Day 59 - April 8, 2016
On Monday morning, when I left for work, my truck had a flat tire. Luckily, I have my weekend truck, Rusty, so I hopped in. Rusty is a 1992 Dodge Cummins that is fixed up really nice. When I got to my exit for work, steam started coming from my engine. Turns out, my radiator blew a hole. So I called my brother who sent my dad with a trailer to come pick Rusty up. When I got home from work, I changed out the flat tire, and the next day I dropped off my truck to get new tires and an alignment. Why does it seem like these things always happen on Monday. That, along with a possible new job opportunity that fell into my lap (more on that in a later post), and the rental property activity which I will describe below, made for a busy week.
Back in December, I was doing a lot of marketing on facebook for my sign business YRL Enterprises. My plan was to target real estate agents, show them my work, and suggest to them that my signs would make great closing gifts for their clients. Very few realtors responded, and nobody bought anything. On Monday of this week while I was out to lunch, I got a facebook message from one of these realtors, we'll call her Melinda, asking about the signs in the message. I replied with the information on the signs and then said, "by the way, my wife and I are looking to purchase an investment rental property, let me know if you come across anything."
We are not unhappy with Gibo, he's just too busy to get anything done for us. He mentioned in a facebook post that he had 20 houses in escrow and 20 houses listed. At this point I am not sure how rare or hard that is to accomplish, but I have a feeling when I understand it I'm going to be surprised. All I know is, we haven't really heard from him. We never signed an agreement with him, and if he calls us with another property, we will certainly go look at it. I'm not sure, but I think as an investor, we have the freedom to talk to as many real estate agents as we want to.
Anyways, the next day, I got an email from Melinda with a list of 10 potential properties to look at. We eliminated 8 of them that didn't meet our criteria, i.e. not enough bedrooms or bathrooms, a little too high on price, one was a mobile home, etc. So that left 2 that we wanted to look at. The first one was in zip code 78412 in Corpus Christi, and within walking distance to the malls. It is a 3br 2bath single family home in a decent neighborhood for sale for $87k. It had some upgrades including paint inside and out, but needed new appliances, and new floors. Estimated monthly rent income for this house is $950-$1000/month. Preliminary number indicate that in order for this property to work out, we would need to purchase it for around $70k.
The second property is in zip code 78362 in Ingleside. Industry in the area near Ingleside is exploding, so we anticipate the need for housing to be on the rise. This property is a bank foreclosure, and needs a lot of work. It is listed at $88k and we estimate it needs $8-10k worth of work. The house needs new carpet in the bedrooms, new tile in the bedrooms/kitchen. Paint inside and out. Holes in the sheetrock patched. New appliances. And then there's the back yard. I should have taken a picture. The back yard was ridiculously overgrown. Worse than anything I have ever seen. The weeds were as tall as me all throughout. Then there was a pile of some kind of vegetation that had grown up in a pyramid shape as tall as the house. Melinda said that banks usually take longer to reply to your offer (up to 2-3 months). I think if we can get this house for around $70k, we'll be ok.
It's starting to get really exciting. We could be weeks away from purchasing our first rental property.
Please check out my website for my other side business/hobby. www.yrlenterprises.com and at facebook.com/yrlenterprises
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