All Forum Posts by: Brian Oney

I have used WilliamPaid.com in the past, but the one feature that I have yet to find is the ability to reject/not accept partial payments. For instance, if your tenant sends you $750 when it should have been $775. 

So does anyone know of an online payment service that allows you to select a threshold or amount of rent that is acceptable and to reject any deposit less than that? I think WilliamPaid also had the ability to tack on late fees (like many other services), though it was a fairly simple one-time late fee (not a fee for every day late).

@Account Closed I often ask myself "Why?" on the possibility of improvements too, haha. Seriously though, I am primarily focused on the "must do's" and then was only considering the improvements to possibly sell the house faster. But that is why I actually prefer Option #2 from the original post - to not consider any improvements unless it doesn't sell within the first 2 months. That way I do avoid paying the money and not getting a return on it.

@Bill Gulley So new tile in the kitchen (along with white DW), as long as it isn't an over-upgrade versus comps, right?

@Account Closed What is the best way to address the square footage difference? The only addition to the house does show up in the county records, so I think I am ok there. Would I just need to pay for an assessor to come out and measure it?

@J. Martin Hank is from a fictional town of Arlen, TX

@Account Closed The main buyers from my earlier discussions with the Realtor will be FHA (~90%). There haven't been too many comps lately, but into mid-last year they were running the $45-48/sq foot. An investor there would be paying more like $30/sq foot. My main motivation for improving the kitchen would be to emotionally hook someone quickly on buying the house, haha. The kitchen is great sized for this old of house (1910), but my only real concern was it being too "dated".

It is nice that my wife is the more optimistic one about things, because as you can tell I always see the bad :)

@Mark Langdon Thank you for the response. Our realtor did say that we would think through what upgrades, if any, to do once the outside work is done and we walk the house again. I have done what window shopping I can on the internet, but no clear cut preferences from that.

@Bill Gulley Yeah, we had to replace the stove about 1 year ago and we were just going to let the DW die, ha. I did consider replacing the DW, like you said to make it match the white facade of the other appliances, especially since it would only be a couple hundred dollars. Is the mismatch of colors a fairly big stickout to buyers?

What type of new, off-white floors would you recommend? The downstairs bathroom has a white tile that looks pretty good. The upstairs bathroom has vinyl like the kitchen. I'm not sure that I want to spend the labor $ for installing tile in the upstairs bathroom (the upside is that it is a small sq footage).

We were originally told that with the "givens" our asking price could be $68-72k (roughly $45-48/sq foot). No asking price was really quoted for the upgrades. One thing that does help us out, is that after re-measuring the house it appears to be roughly 1900 sq foot not the 1176 that the county thinks it is or the 1500 that we gave the realtor to get the $68-72k range. Unfortunately we still owe $76k on it (bought at wrong time & then we both were laid off).

We are currently working on preparing our former first-home-turned-rental-house to sell. We are getting a new exterior paint job and touching up the outside (replacing broken sidewalk and fixing negative drainage).

Those are givens, but now we are trying to decide whether to spend the money to replace/upgrade items in the kitchen and 2 bathrooms. This house is in south central Kansas (near Wichita) and would be a first-time home buyer house.

Below is the kitchen. We have considered replacing the countertop, adding a backsplash, and replacing the flooring (probably in that order of priority).

This is the upstairs bathroom. We have considered changing the flooring here as well, and possibly going with a pedestal sink.

This is the downstairs bathroom. The only thing to really do here is possibly a pedestal sink.

Since we live out-of-state, the work would almost surely have to be contracted out. Since I would like to get the house on the market as soon as possible I see two options:

1) Do all of the work, including upgrades to Kitchen and Bathrooms upfront before putting the house on the market

2) Do the "givens", put the house on the market; If it does not sell within 2 months, then make upgrades

We are just not sure that there would be a positive return on the money spent on the upgrades. Option #1 would get the house on the market roughly June 1st. Option #2 would get the house on the market roughly April 26th. Thoughts?

@Paul Timmins

Thank you for the recommendations. I have an RSS feed setup for the blogposts, so I can read during my commute on the train. I also download several of the podcasts to listen to, even while at work, ha.

I am not as interested in flipping, so I have focused more on Landlording, even getting the "Landlording" book by Leigh Robinson (pretty good overall). I do want to get more knowledgeable about estimating repair costs.

Thanks for the tip on HUD too!

@Brandon Turner I may be "experienced" but I use that label very loosely, haha. Working in the corporate world at improving business processes I see a lot of similarities between that and RE investors. Namely the idea that "everyone knows the same basics, so there must not be anything left for me".

There are two main fallacies with that thinking:

1) Not everyone knows the basics. It always amazes me how many companies run so inefficiently and ineffectively - the same is true with RE investors. Why? Because almost everyone starts off small, and then usually grows faster than they have time to create efficient/effective systems. That is why I LOVE the forums and blogs about automating/standardizing processes.

2) Just because people know what to do or learned at one point what to do, it DOES NOT mean that they actually follow through. How many newbies end up getting disappointed soon after realizing that there really is "sweat equity"? I think that is why the community aspect really comes in handy, to make those speed bumps in investing smaller and speed up the learning cycle.

Today I finally upgraded from a Free member to Plus member. So why am I introducing myself? Because I never took the time to do it when I originally joined (insert shameful look here). So this is my mea culpa.

REI Background/Experience

When I was growing up my parents actually owned a SFH property in our small town in Kansas - it was one of their previous owner-occupied houses, before remodeling the house we lived in. So I watched for several years, how the less sophisticated side of property management works - no real thought about profitability, making the house nicer than it needs to be, but I did learn about getting the right tenant.

Flash forward to the first house that my wife and I bought, roughly August 2007, in Newton, KS - a beautiful, wood sided Victorian house built in 1910. 18 months later, my wife and I were laid off on the same day from the same company, with our 6 month old daughter in tow. So we shortly became accidental landlords as we moved out of state for my job opportunity. Due to the economy, we just wanted to get the mortgage paid (even though we probably should have just walked away), so we rented it for the next 4 years at $10/month above our payment, taxes and insurance. The tenants left the place in relatively good shape and we re-rented to a short-term professional on a 6-month lease - increasing the rent by $150/month.

REI Aspirations

We are hoping to sell the SFH in Kansas once the lease is up and we make some last needed repairs (exterior paint and other cosmetics). That way we can get it off our books to focus on something much closer to the DFW area, where we currently live and plan to live.

Ideally we would find a small multiplex that we could owner-occupy in DFW (namely northern Dallas area), but as mentioned in other posts, those seem overpriced at this point. I just like the idea of living in a decent duplex, renting out the other side and then rolling over that success into more small multis.

We are looking to move this summer closer to both of our jobs and preferably we could get an investment property to move into. However, at this point that seems like a long shot as our main focus remains on selling our existing SFH, then focusing on a place to live closer to work and finally hoping that place to live is an investment property.

I did attend the DFW Biggerpockets January meeting, which included an excellent discussion by @Grant Kemp . I look forward to attending more meetings and continuing to learn.

The Short Story aka Summary

I've seen the mistakes my parents made in their small town rental and I have experienced first-hand the difficulties of an old SFH managed from out-of-state. Once we sell our original primary residence, we will be looking to re-deploy our capital into a small multi (or settle for a SFH) in the DFW area.

I do want to thank the community as a whole for being so helpful during my time as a free member, when I would ask several questions and often spend hours reading forum posts to learn more about a new topic.

It has been interesting following the experiences of @Bryce Y. and the input from the other DFWites.

I agree with Bryce on my own living circumstance - renting for a decent price is better than buying a SFH for myself. The only thing that will swing that is the possibility of owner-occupying a duplex. However, as Bryce said, it seems really hard anymore to find good deals on small multi's in the DFW area.