Courthouse deal with bumps, bruises and a happy ending
A little over a year ago I bought a real mess of a house on the courthouse steps. I got the house for 11k and had to put about 6k in to make it livable. The house had belonged to the aunt of some former students of mine and she lost it after letting a tenant pay rent and just pocketing the money instead of paying the mortgage. The students were actually supposed to be moving in next when she lost it. So I bought it with the intention of owner financing it to the girls( two sisters) Long story short they never got up a down payment but did wind up renting the house. They rented for 10 months before they disappeared and left the place trashed. I cleaned out the junk they left, including a fridge with food in it with the power off for 3 weeks, (barf) and ripped up the disgusting carpet. I put it on the market at 29,900 and closed on the sale last week for 25k cash.
what I learned-
from the beginning I had a feeling this could go bad with the girls but I really wanted to help them. Bad Idea. Helping them wasn't appreciated in the end and now we have some bad blood between us as they are having to pay me for the damages.
a crappy house means crappy tenants, even though I fixed this house up to livable safe condition I didn't put a lot of money into the repairs, aside from a new roof. The location and surrounding area would only have produced more crappy tenants and even though the house cash flowed at a high rate that headache was not for me.
These kind of tenants will worry you to death about every little thing and a crappy house is always going to need something done.
I wound up with the rental income and the proceeds from the sale coming out around 10k to the good but the stress of the whole thing made it not really worth the hassle.
long story longer - there are a ton of folks on BP who will tell you all the things I just said before you live it but living it makes it real!!!