All Forum Posts by: Jason L.

@Brian Reiner They look great. Were these for rentals or flips? If they were rentals, how did it impact demand? I do worry if they're a bit too niche for a rental (granted this is a 2/1, so it's probably going to be rented by someone young without a family. I think they'd be less fickle).

 It's part of a duplex in a class B neighborhood (it's really a main house with a separate mother-in-law suite). Nice but not high-end by any means. The full kitchen upgrade over just saving the old kitchen probably takes this from a standard $1100-$1150/month unit to above-average $1250-$1300/mo unit. However, the cost to save the old kitchen is likely $1000-$1500. To use the cabinets the handyman wants me to use and then to buy granite and appliances separately would cost about $7000 total. So $5500-6000 extra in rehab maybe gets an extra $150/month. That's why I'd like to get the materials down $1000 or so because otherwise it feels like it'll take too long to get my money back.

@Brian Reiner Do you have pictures of the kitchen where you use shelves? I'm buying this property long distance. It would help if I could show something to my handyman (I also can't assemble any cabinets for myself for obvious reasons).

 I don't know what the linear footage is. The kitchen as a whole is about 70 SF. Here are the specs my handyman drew up:

@Jen R. It's not a high end property, but it'll be a competitive one in a class B market ($1200-$1300 rent range).  We're not moving any plumbing, but we are going to add a dishwasher next to the sink since there currently isn't one. Is the $1100 you said you paid for RTA just for lowers or for uppers as well? What might be a typical range after install?

@Mark S. I forgot about IKEA. Great idea. I will go this weekend.

I am remodeling a small kitchen (70 SF) I have on a house I have under contract right now. The kitchen is old and dingy, and I wanted to change it out so that we can add a dishwasher to the space (there currently isn't one, which I know will hurt rents). I had budgeted about $4500 for the kitchen, but early bids have it closer to a $6500-$7000 project (which seems like a ton for such a small kitchen just to change cabinets, countertop, and buy refurbished appliances, but I could be wrong). We're also already about $6k over budget without factoring in anything over $4500 for the kitchen.

My property manager and his contractor have been trying to sell me on using nicer wood cabinets, which we could get for about $2800. I know we can get the cheap stock wood cabinets at Home Depot for closer to $1300. While obviously there is a difference in quality and lifespan, I wonder if it just makes more sense fiscally to buy the stock cabinets? It is a rental property after-all, and at that price I can basically buy those same cabinets twice for the same cost as the nicer ones. However, the contractor thinks it's a bad idea.

Anybody have any experience with cabinet decisions on rental properties? Does it pay to pay up or should I just take the immediate savings using the HD cabinets?

You're on the right track, but as others have warned, you probably need to drive around because zips can be deceptive. You'll probably need to play the game of "good block, bad block" to really get a sense.

A few areas I'd for sure keep out of:

1) Sulphur Springs

2) Anything between where Downtown ends to North Howard (basically Howard Ave goes from really nice to horror show extremely quickly)

3) Generally speaking, most areas by Busch Gardens are pretty rough.

A few things to remember about Rentometer:

1) The average and median prices they report also usually include a margin of error. So it might say $1050 +/- 4%. So what they're really saying is the average price is actually somewhere in the interval between $1008 - $1092. So don't take the $1050 number as gospel.

2) Even with #1 in mind, that range is just the average of ALL houses/apartments in that area. The dispersion of all houses within the total distribution of the market could go much wider than that. Some units will be above the higher end of that (nicer neighborhood, bigger house, more amenities, nicer upgrades) and some will be well below that range (not upgraded, on a rougher street, smaller, etc). So even if the average is $1050 that doesn't mean that houses also couldn't go for $1250 or $800 in the same area depending on its individual characteristics.

3) It's not entirely clear where Rentometer pulls its data from, but I think they are using list prices instead of actual lease prices. While most houses probably do rent for what the list price actually was, it rarely goes above that but could frequently go below. So if a house is listed for rent for $1000, it most likely rented for $1000 or lower, but Rentometer would always pick it up at $1000 even if it actually rented for $950. That probably skews averages a bit higher, but probably not by that much.

4) Also remember that they are mixing both houses and apartments together. It's not apples to apples.

 How did you handle all of the years of transactions for the 25 properties before you converted? Did you manually add them or did you just move on using the software from the present?

I've struggled with this recently as well. I had an Excel sheet where I kept track of every individual expense/rent payment for my first rental, but I just bought 2 more units and now I've been working on building a more robust version of the sheet that can handle multiple properties. It's a pain, but I also don't know how to get all of my old transactions from my original spreadsheet into something more efficient like a Quickbooks and I don't want to "lose" all my old transactions by converting now.