All Forum Posts by: Waverly Rennie

this is great news, congratulations on your good deal. I am inspired by the posts here and will "stand fast" on my price for a property i am bidding on through home search.com. They seem to be ending the bidding with no winner but then selling the properties at below reserve price to whoever the highest bidder was, plus 5k (based on an analysis of 2 sales so far, so not very many data points.)

So glad you got a deal and thanks for giving us the update!

super impressed! what great design and i love the before and afters. You seem to have an ethical approach (I read some of your website stuff) and I hope you sell this beautiful home for a healthy profit. I look forward to more of your deals! and if you wanted to give more details on what your costs were, and lessons learned, that would be really helpful.

best of luck and thanks again for this useful post!

Don't know if this is too late and too tangential, but we just finished the process of turning our house in the Tampa area into a AirBnB/VRBO property. I was going to try to handle the bookings through those two websites, and then have my neighbor down there be the go to person who would over see the cleaner, call handymen etc. I was thinking about a monthly retainer or a percentage of the rental income. But she doesn't do this for a living and I think we both realized it was more of a job than she wanted to take on. I interviewed a couple of management companies who would take 20% of the rental income, as I remember, or maybe 50% if they did the booking. One scenario was that they would charge me $100 a month plus 20% of the income, but I would handle the bookings, and they would handle the broken toilet at 11pm.

Eventually I ended up hiring a couple who are renting out a few properties on AirBnB since they are very short term rental savvy and specifically on AirBnB/VRBO, have a team of handymen etc whom they can call, and can go by the property as needed. They are now handling everything including adjusting pricing as needed to increase bookings during slow seasons, paying the cleaner and telling her when cleaning is needed, and for this they are charging 20% of the income. We have set up a joint checking account which i keep topped up around $2k- they take their fee, the cleaner's payment, etc. out of that. They also handle returning the security deposit to the clients once my cleaner calls them to let them know if there are any problems.

One thing that is nice with this is that they encouraged me to go from a week minimum to a 3 night minimum since that increases the probability of finding clients and at the beginning I need to get some reviews. Since I charge clients separately for the cleaning, there is no cost difference to me to rent it for 3 nights v 6 or 7 nights, other than having to wash the linens and provide a fresh set of toiletries twice in the week as v. once. My cleaner is happy because she is getting more money.

So far it's great, since I am currently in Guinea working on Ebola and not on line that much!

Hope this helps as at least a data point in your thinking......best of luck!

thanks to all- I don't think the architect or contractor are crooks but I think they need to be motivated to make a more reasonable bid, and getting bids from others seems to be the way to go.

thanks again to everyone for your input and suggestions. I will meet with @J Scott when I get back from Guinea and see what he thinks. Now back to our regularly scheduled investor programming!!

Thanks so much to @Chris Seveney for taking a look at the SD, and to all of you for your comments. @Aaron McGinnis is right, this is an investor forum and I am asking a consumer question, which isn't really a good use of people's time and is off-track. @Jscott is on vacation right now and couldn't recommend a GC, just subs. 

Thanks again to all of you- I can't believe this forum exists! I am off to work in Guinea on Ebola for the next few weeks (see why I want to change careers?) but when I get back I will use all the very helpful suggestions, put on my big girl panties and have a serious heart to heart with my architect and contractor about finding a more reasonable way to renovate this custom, hysterical (to quote @K. marie) extravaganza.

 BP rocks!

@Manolo D. that's very interesting information. We have been paying the architect step by step as we have gone through the various stages, up to SD and construction drawings which are done. Permits have been applied for but not pulled.

@Jason Hatfield, you are right. @Chris Seveney is so kind to offer to review.  My husband is amazed at all the helpful advice and now understands why I have spent a little time responding to a few other people's queries talking about what I have learned in my limited experience.

@Jon Klaus you are thinking out of the box! but we've been here, sharing the house with my sister and her husband, for 18 years. It has taken that long for the copper beech to get taller than my head! the wing on the right is what we are renovating and doing a second floor on the middle section with the two shuttered windows.

Thank you all for your comments and advice. It is true that this is a very expensive location, it's all custom work, there are two bathrooms and a kitchen, and it is retail. 

But I think I may do as @Gilbert Dominguez and others day and say to the builder, "Wait, stop, how much do I owe you up until now? I am going to bid it out to see what the market says. " If nothing else, if the bids all come in similarly high, I can feel good that at least I tried not to get gouged. Or I might do as Colin suggests and see where we can cut some cuts- we had already sat with him to see where we could cut some costs e.g. changing some of the way the architect had designed the cathedral ceiling in the (as @Ryan D put it) coolest MIL ever.....

Thanks so much @Matt M. and @Derek T. for your inputs. When we were first talking about this two years ago we were thinking it would be 200-250K, as I remember. I had a friend come by who is married to an architect who works here in the DC/MD area and she looked at what we were planning and said, boy that looks like a 300K rehab to me, and I was surprised.

Would I be allowed to copy in what the estimate said if I left off identifying info?

@Colin L. They are in fact knocking down the end part of the wing (what had been a free-standing billiard room that was then connected to the main house by a summer kitchen) and re-building it from scratch. So that's demo and then new construction, with a master bath addition built out from that. The middle section, the summer kitchen is going down to the studs, and a second floor with dormers being added on top. The section next to the main house, also a bath, is being taken down to the studs as well. 

as you say, it's all "new electrical, plumbing, hvac, insulation, sheetrock, roofing, etc, etc throughout"

but he is charging 25k for the demo! which indicates to me he's charging a LOT.

@Roy N. thanks for the link.

Can I tell him i need to bid this thing out, and pay him for the time he has put into this so far?

@Ryan Dossey The architect said when we started on all this, oh the guys I work with usually come in around the same amount so it's better to just choose one and work with them. We started this process over 2 years ago before I had started getting into REI and I was pretty naive. So now I don't know if I can go back, ethically, on what we agreed to!