House #5 has been in escrow since mid-April and the buyer was struggelling to qualify for financing.  Just as we where getting ready to throw the buyer out of escrow, they emailed us and said they are approved to draw loan docs!!  This was great news, but where not that confident in their abilities.

At the end, they did, somehow, end up closing!

This house is actually our lowest profit deal.  Which really suprises me, the house looks great in my opinion and we bought it at the right price. It boiled down to three things, when we sold it the area comps were really bad, we went about $5,000 of budget in fixing it and the house is quite small (3 bedroom 2 bathrooms in 1,000 sq ft).

The Before and After Pictures

Front

Before

After

Kitchen

Before

After

(this picture is before it was finished and the bar top granite was not installed yet)

Bathroom

Before

After

Backyard

Before

After

Sorry again for the lack of activity, I have been swamped with a couple other businesses I’m involved in and getting our existing properties into escrow.

House #6: This house has been in escrow forever now, since March.  The buyer had credit issues that are now fixed, but the agent has not been ideal to work with.  I think she has been stretching the truth the whole way through (but what agent doesn’t ).  It is set to close within the next week, if it does not, I have an $8,500 earnest money deposit that I will be keeping (and won’t feel very bad about it), as they have removed all contingencies.

House #5: This one has also been in escrow for a long time.  We’ve put the property back on the market (and got an offer today), but my escrow officer has a connection at the loan company and it sounds like this one should go through with the existing buyer before the end of the month as well.  This one has been in escrow about 50 days now, which is a long but seems to be the norm on FHA sales right now.

House #8: This one has been in escrow 45 days now, and we have all loan conditions removed, just waiting for docs.  Should close mid-next week .

House #11: Apparently, I haven’t written about this one at all, but this one we picked up at a sweet deal!  We accepted a really high VA offer, but VA appraisals are assigned randomly and the appraisal came in $28,000 under what we had it in escrow at.  We had a couple backup offers that fell through, so we did some fancy negotiating but still took a $15,000 hair cut (from original).  Luckily, it is a meaty deal, so there is still pletny of profit.

House #4: I will write about this one and upload some pictures.  We put it in escrow about two weeks ago, appraisal was good and we’re have a strongly qualified buyer, so I am hoping for smooth sailing.

The good news, if everything goes as planned we should close four properties before the end of June.

The bad news, we’ve looked at over 100 properties in June and probably made at least 50 offers.  So far we’ve missed everything, and not by just a little bit.  The moratoriums have really made the market go haywire.   One property was listed at $89,000, we were willing to pay $115,000, it ended up getting 40+ cash offers and went into escrow at $144,500.   Just amazing!  We’re going to keep on looking, hopefully I’ll have some time to catch up on the older blog posts.

I have not had time to post very much lately.  I wish I could say it was because I was off on vacation, but we have been swamped closing properties, getting permits and fixing what we got.

House #3 – In Escrow (or Close)
This house should be in escrow today at a solid above asking price offer.  There has been two or three days of delay getting it into escrow, but it seems like the buyer is thinking it is his already, which makes the chances of him closing pretty high.  Crossing my fingers.

House #5 – On Market
We finished repairs on this one and had an open house this weekend!  Because of the FHA 90 day flip rule we have listed it quite high and have about 45 days before we can even take an FHA offer anyways.  So we are planning to just sit back and see if we can somehow get a conventional offer.  I will post some pictures of the finished product shortly.

House #6 – Under Repairs
Our contractors have been hitting this house hard!  It is starting to look awesome.  Our budget one this one was $30,000 and it really shows that we can pretty much make the house totally brand new in 30 days for that amount.

Fire Place – Before

Fire Place – After

House #4 – Just got Permits
House #4 is a huge job!  We closed in October and tore it to the studs and worked on getting permits for a 500 sq ft kitchen addition.  We got this property real cheap, and it’s in a pretty good neighborhood, so we are going to do well, but it might take a little while along the way.

House #8 – Should Close Escrow this Week
We should purchase this house tomorrow.  Our repair budget is a cheap $14,000 and we are hoping to be in and out in about a week, but we will see.

Will post some before and after pictures of House #5 shorty!

House #5 has a story behind it, like every property does.  When we first started making offers, we had no farm area.  We looked anywhere and everywhere.

Well one afternoon, we looked at two houses side-by-side.  Our crazy optimistic side dreamed that we’d be able to buy both properties at a HUGE discount and rehab them both at the same time.  So we ended up submitting offers on both of them (two different asset managers) in the low 100k range.  They both needed a ton of work and the we didn’t get built into a maze, one bedroom connects to another with probably 8 “bedrooms”.  We never heard back for almost three months and the “maze” ended up selling for $160,000. Two months later we got a call back from an agent asking if our offer was still valid on the house next door.  We reviewed things and let the agent know we’d be willing to re-submit our offer at $88k. So we got this property, in better condition then the neighbors for $72k less (almost 50%) then the one right next door.  And sure enough while I was looking through the property, the neighbor introduced himself and asked what we paid for it!  I have to admit I was not completely honest with him.

So now we have this property under contract, at a great price, so we start getting excited.  But like we experienced with House #2, the City ended up putting a lien on this house and would not allow escrow to transfer the property until the grass was green again.  To make a long story short, we opened escrow in early October and did not close until December 11.

I will post more info that details about the repair process, as we are almost complete fixing it.  But our budget is $20,000 the only non-cosmetic change we are making is converting the master half bath to a small full bathroom.

Before Picture