Rental Property Investor · Larkspur, CO · Member since 2018 · 198 posts · 179 votes
My wife and I do a hybrid of flipping and long term rentals on single fam homes. I‘ve come to realize that some homes make better flips and some better rentals based on their floor plan, build, and the age of major items/systems.
My question specifically: In your eyes, what are you looking for in a house that makes it a great, low maintenance rental?
At this point I’m looking for ranch style homes with good roofs (none flat), furnace/AC mid life or better, brick exterior is a bonus, double pane windows, younger than 1950’s. If it’s a two story, that’s OK, but preferably no bathrooms on the second floor, certainly no tubs or showers up there. I also try to stay away from finished basements for the risk of water damage and mold in my climate.
What are your criteria? Have these criteria saved you a lot of money over time?
Handyman · Pittsburgh, PA · Member since 2018 · 5k+ posts · 13k+ votes
4y
Well, this is the smartest new topic from a building perspective I've seen in a while.
I think it's different in different places in the country. In the Pittsburgh, where I live, there was something of a golden age of building 2-bedroom duplexes, from 1945-1960.
Brick-veneer, good mortar, furnace/AC should be replaced with American Standard or Trane ASAP, good-quality vinyl window replacements with no window wrapping (window wrapping is often a curse on brick veneer, because when it fails it tends to hide where water starts getting into the brick and infiltrating the walls). Simple, straightforward roof and gutter construction. Plaster on metal lath construction, always more durable than plaster on wood lath or plasterboard and early drywall. Minimal or no renovations from the initial build to now. Basement laundry hookups with floor drains. Solid attics with heavy beams and heavy roof decking, minimal trusswork, roofs that can survive the test of time and inevitable water infiltration in a place where it rains as much as it does here. When you're lucky, you find places that were carefully maintained over the years and had most of the cast iron drainage taken out of them and replaced with ABS. Also when you're lucky, you find that the shower system for the one bathroom, which was almost always originally a three-handle system, has been replaced with something less prone to failure.
These are the best low maintenance rentals in my area, in my opinion.
It's impossible to get these places without a bathroom on the second floor, but yes, you're right about that. And finished basements, especially anything finished in the 80s and 90s, do end up being mold factories.
In our area, there are multiple small tracts of these, streets on streets of them in the near Pittsburgh suburbs.
Concrete slab.... Brick or concrete exterior walls.... HVAC Inside Air Handler in the closet, not attic.... Prefer 1-story only... Solid roof... Tight seals all the way around.... Wide enough sewer pipes to prevent blockage?