The Haggle House is officially occupied — the new tenant has done her walk-through, paid her first month’s rent and is in the process of moving in…
In addition, after purchasing with all-cash and making repairs with our own funds, we’ve refinanced and pulled out about 75% of our total costs; now that we only have a small amount of cash invested into the property, we expect to achieve decent annual returns as a rental. Based on our income and expense projections, we expect somewhere between 13-14% cash-on-cash return and a total return (if you take into account the equity we’ll accrue by paying down the loan) of about 24%.
Better yet, I estimate the property could be sold today for about $85K, so we now have about $30K in equity in the property; if we hold for a couple more year, I’m hopeful that the value will increase to at least $100K, so when we’re ready to sell, we should make a nice profit.
You’ve got it all wrong. You are supposed to lose money each month, and the longer you hold the property the less it should be worth. That’s how I do it!
Luckily, I’ve been able to learn from your mistakes, Ez…
Shouldn’t I get something for that? I know, I know… don’t answer that J:)
Hi J,
Is this a local bank that makes their own loans (not Fannie Mae compliant)? We’re having a very hard time finding banks that would do cash-out re-finance if we own the property for less than 6 months. They said it’s Fannie Mae rule.
Thanks,
Angie
@Ezra: Sounds like the story of my rental portfolio :-).
You mentioned that you think the home will go up in value by 15k next year. What would give you that inclination. Do you forsee some upside in real estate prices, if so why?
Angie –
Yes, this is a small local bank in my area that does their own loans (portfolio loans). They are accustomed to working with investors, so they understand the types of loan products investors need…
Hey Thomas –
The specific area where this house is was hit pretty hard last year by flooding (atypical of this area, they consider it a once-every-500-year event), and because this wasn’t an area prone to flooding, most of the homeowners didn’t have flood insurance. So, literally thousands of houses in the area were destroyed and foreclosed upon (see House #19 for an example). Luckily this particular house wasn’t affected by the flooding, but there is still a stigma associated with the area.
This drove values down considerably in this area, but they’ve already started to rebound, especially with houses that weren’t affected by the flooding. I expect that over the next couple years, values in this specific area will increase rapidly, to at-least their pre-flooding level, and hopefully higher (if the market starts to rebound in that time). That would put this house somewhere in the $110-130K range within about 3 years, if my assumptions are correct.
Thomas –
Btw, this was the specific reason we decided to hold this property as a rental instead of immediately reselling it, as we do with most of our properties. While we likely could have made $15-20K very quickly by reselling, we felt that there was tremendous upside in holding for just a couple years…
That makes sense, sound like you got a great deal:)
I thought that maybe the macro economic fundamentals of the real estate market led to your belief of higher prices. Unfortunately i don’t think we are there yet.
While I think that the worst may (almost) be over, I agree that the fundamentals of this recession aren’t going to change quickly and I also believe that real estate market improvements will trail overall economic improvements over the next couple years. The good news is, it’s a great time to buy, and probably will be for a while longer… 🙂
Congrats! How many hours of your personal time do you think you’ve invested in this particular project?
Ivan –
This was actually a very simple project, and my project manager (who is also serving as my property manager) did most of the work. In total, I probably spent about 4 hours on the purchase, 2 hours dealing with rehab issue, and then another 4 hours on renting it (much of that was creating forms/contracts and putting in place processes since this is our first rental). So, overall, I’ve probably spent about 10 hours on this project personally.
Hey J!
Looks like all is going so well for you guys!!! Even with handicapped wifey….you got things under control!!! 🙂
Awesome job!