All Forum Posts by: Brad S.

My inlaws own a MH park in Indiana. They are often buying and rehabbing homes to fill up their park. Your offer price sounds closer to what they would pay for a unit needing a lot of work. On a single wide, they may sell it for $12-14K done depending on age and size. They are less interested in making money on the flip and prefer to make it on the cashflow and increased property appreciation.

Your market, of course, may be different in what MH's sell for. It sounds like the owner has some motivation, but she may be unrealistic in her expectations. What is the exit strategy for the mobile home?

Interesting topic. I have been thinking through the same as I try to narrow down my farm areas. One way that I am working through is using sales transactions downloaded from the county auditor's site. The trick will translating those property addresses into a geography (e.g. Zip, City, Census Block, etc) in order to aggregate the values for the geography.

My current thoughts are to us GIS software (Quantum GIS) to hopefully bring in the data and help with the aggregation. I could also pull in other information into the system to also help analyze areas.

I have lived in California from 8-12 grade and a couple of years after college. I do miss the climate and diversity of outdoor activities. However, at this stage in my life I wouldn't move back. The midwest is so much more affordable and in my opinion a great place to raise a family if you are choice-full in where you live. It's a little bit tougher socially if you are not in the family phase, but there are some hotbeds of younger professional (we're home to some major Fortune 500 companies) activity and downtown Cincy is becoming a great destination.

We live in a small city (about 3 square miles) within the heart of greater Cincinnati. Between our kid's school and sports as well as other activities, it seems like we know a good deal of our small city's residents. It's great to go down to the local art show or festival and constantly run into people you know. I think this type of experience is hard to find in CA, but should be easier to find in some of the midwestern cities like Cincy.

As Chad Meyer alludes to above, Cincinnati is a fairly complex area. I am struggling through the same with you in trying to determine my farm area and i have lived here for over 12 years. Greater Cincinnati is a patchwork of neighborhoods and villages. There are some really rough areas and some real gems. Sometimes the gems are a bubble in the middle of a rough area.

Hopefully someone will come up with a good site suggestion for investors, but you may want to look at http://www.city-data.com/forum/cincinnati. There are good discussions on the different areas of Cincy there.

One thing you will have to do is get rid of your Cali price bias. Depending on your objectives $150K could go pretty far here.

To my knowledge truss uplift is a common cosmetic issue. I wouldn't worry about it if that is the cause of the ceiling to wall cracks. Some good latex caulk should fix that. Active foundation movement is a whole other thing.

http://www.inspectionlibrary.com/truss.htm

As the others suggested, I would want to see specifics on what was done. I would also a professional opinion from a structural engineer if there are major signs of foundation shifting. In my experience, it is hard for the home buyer to get a clear answer from the structural engineer. In an ideal situation, you will monitor the cracks over a period of time to determine if active movement is happening or not. Unfortunately, you don't have that luxury.

I'm not expert, but I'm not sure if the second photo is foundation related. If this is the ceiling under the roof, this may be due to truss uplift. A common issue as trusses move in response to the weather.

I think you are on the right track to solve the problem before you fix the symptom. Your first course of action is to keep water away from the foundation. The fact that you have puddles near it indicates the yard isn't properly graded. You want the ground to slope away from the foundation for roughly 10 feet or so. Additionally, you want the ground to be about 8" under the top of the foundation. A kick internet search will give you specifics.

Do your downspouts dump into the yard, or into a pipe? If it goes into a pipe, it usually empties out into the street. I would watch the gutters and downspouts in a heavy rainstorm to see if they are doing their job.

Do you have an easy way to do this?