Hi everyone, I'm so glad to find BP when I was searching for real estate podcast. It is such a great community to connect with the like-minded people and learn from other people's experience.
I'm originally from China, and just moved to Charlotte, NC area a year ago, where I first met my husband during a business trip. We were married for a year now and both have a full-time job. My husband is an engineer/ programmer and I'm a financial analyst. Our job has nothing to do with real estate, but we fell in love with investing due to the influence of "Rich dad, Poor dad" and HGTV show. My husband started investing in 2006, he got his real estate license, quit his job (he was a lab assistant researching on mice at the moment!), started working as realtor. After helping other people buying and selling house for a while, he jumped right into the market and bought 3 houses in a short period of time. He lived in one of the house and started to rehab while working a full time job and rented out the other two. He planned to flip and sell the house in 6 months but then the market crashed. He had to change plan and stayed in the house and was able to find a roommate who became his good friend now. We just sold the house last year and was able to gain some profit. We started looking for house as our primary residential. He always say you get your profit when you buy it. So it took us a long time to find a good deal. We purchased this single family house in the beginning of this year. The seller was the original home owner and lived there forever. When we first see the house, there's no flooring, they tore the old nasty carpet, and there's stuff everywhere. And she has at least 4 cats. So you can imagine how smelly and messy the house was. But we loved the house at the first sight, we see lots of potential. It's in a great neighborhood with great floorplan. The house is in good shape, just need cosmetic work and our own touch. They're asking 180k and we put an offer of 160k immediately after we check on the house. I was a little concerned if they'll accept the offer cause I really liked the property. Soon, our agent tell us that we got the deal. When we closed the deal, the original home owner told me that they wanted to sell us the house the moment we walked in. They heard my husband and I talking about ideas to open up walls, change layout, add walk-in-closet, etc. They were so attached to the house and they believed that we could give the house its new life. They even asked for pictures after we renovate the house. We spent one month to reframe the kitchen, drywalls, electric, scrape the popcorn ceiling, set part of the floor down. Just good enough to move in. Then we slowly to rehab it as weekend project. My husband is a very smart guy and a great handyman. He self-taught himself and I find he can do everything, literally everything! I always have a good taste, so I'm the interior designer and he will come up with a plan to make it happen. I'll post the pictures after we finished renovating. I know, it's quite a long time. But you just tend to slow down once you moved in. However, we changed our original plan and decide to hold it as rental property now because I got a new job only a few days after we purchased the house. I wanted to move a little closer to work to avoid driving long distance. It was a pity that we couldn't enjoy the house that we put so much work on, but I'm sure we'll find a better one in the future.
I didn't plan to write such a long paragraph. Apologize for grammar mistake if there is any. My husband always tease me about my poor grammar. Hope to learn more investing and landlording in BP. BTW, we just evicted our tenant for the first time. It is very painful and shocking for me. I would never expect it's so difficult to deal with tenant. It is very different from China.
