I should have posted about this before Christmas, because this house sold on December 21.  But I am way behind, as you know.

We bought this house at the end of July and ended up owning it almost 150 days (you got to love the FHA 90 day rule).  The house had slight fire damage and needed a lot of repairs for a small house, the listing agent was someone we have not worked with before.

The original offer was way above what I thought it would appraise for, with us paying for some closing costs.  I spoke with the buyer’s agent and he let me know if we did run into appraisal issues his client wanted the house so bad they could pay their owning closing costs.  I was sold, and we opened escrow.

Everything else went pretty smooth, we did have a break-in, which was pretty bad (cost about $3,500 to fix).

Purchase Price were 34% of sales price.  Repairs were 28% of sales price (with the break-in), so that totals 62% on the dollar.  We did sell this property 16% above the original appraised value.

Overall, it was another great deal.

This was supposed to be posted before Christmas, but for some reason it didn’t make it.

So House #15 has gone through a regular appraiser, a review appraisal and was ready to fund.  The buyers did their walk-through on Wednesday and called and mentioned the dishwasher was not working for some reason.  Thursday morning one of our workers called and said we had a real bad break-in the night before it looked like.  Seven broken windows and the guy scratched in writing in a bunch of the walls and cabinets.

Oh well, that is the cost of doing business and break-in’s happen.  As long as we can get it fixed before the lender funds the loan and the buyer comes-back.  But just as my partner was at the site assessing the damage, the buyer’s agent, the buyer roll up to the house to show some of their extended family their soon to new house… CRAP!!

The good news is we had mudded most of the drywall, cleaned up the broken glass so the buyer did appreciate our immediate action, but they are not from the area and has some real concerns about the area they are buying in possibly being a bad one.  After a bit of comforting and promising a couple extra changes we had the buyer comfortable again.

Overall, I would estimate the damage had a cost of $2,000-$2,500 to fix.  Really bad day, but at least it did not cost us our escrow.  All the fixing is now complete and the loan funded Friday, it is set to record Monday.

We should close on House #15 on Monday, we have been ready to close all week, but we have been waiting for the bank to send us the Grant Deed.  It is an extremely cheap house, 2 bedroom 1 bathroom and we are planning to sell it completely rehabed for $120-130k.

The house has very minor fire damage and the City has already recognized this and added a code enforcement lien to the property.  Overall, this house should be a quick 3 week rehab.

• Completely new Kitchen
• Replace Fire Damaged Drywall
• Repaint Exterior of House
• Replace All Windows
• Figure out what to do with the garage

This house will definitely end up selling to an FHA buyer.  So we won’t be able to sell it until the end of October because we have to wait for the FHA 90 day rule.

Terrible Addition to the Garage

Kitchen

We should have this house looking pretty again in no time!

Happy Independence Day!

This business is streaky and after missing out on the really good one I mentioned in my last post, I was a bit disappointed because I thought we had a really chance of getting it.  On Friday we put in a really low offer on a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom house and a granny suite in the back that is a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom.  There was a competitor in the mix, but once he figured out there was code violations, they backed out, so lowered our offer about 12,000 and went in.  I just got disclosures today on July 4th.

My partner is the only that has seen this property.  We are undecided on what we are going to do with it, but it will be tough to wholesale because it has code violations and very slight fire damage.  So it will most likely either be fix and flip, fix rent and flip, or fix and hold.  I will run some numbers and see what we want to do.  Usually if we can pull a certain amount of cash out of it, we’d prefer to just sell it.

We are still looking for one or two more properties, but we still don’t have any of the six in escrow closed yet. The market still seems extremely competitive, we have been looking for a month and a half and still basically missed tons of properties, but we have a lot of pending stuff out there.  I would predict four of the ones in escrow should close before July 15.  Which would really be great, but in this business I know not to count on anything!!