A lot of out-of-state buyers here are working off photos and an inspection summary, and both of those documents are worse than people think. So here's the honest split from the construction side: what a Memphis house will tell you fast and for free, and what it will not tell anybody until somethi...
Something I run into constantly on Memphis turns and rehabs, and I almost never see it in a budget. The average Memphis homeowner sits in the house a long time. Call it 15 years give or take. That is not a market stat that matters until you realize what a 15-year owner-occupant actually does to a...
It's the first week of September, which is the point every year where a Memphis vacancy quietly gets more expensive without anybody noticing. Renters here move on a school calendar and a weather calendar, and both are closing. The families who were going to move already moved in June and July. Wh...
It's the end of August, which means every furnace in Memphis has been sitting idle for five months and nobody has touched one since March. The first real cold night usually lands in late October or early November, and my phone rings for about ten days straight after it. The pattern is always the ...
Out-of-state buyers keep asking what a Memphis rehab costs, and the honest answer is that the year on the tax record tells you more than the zip code does. Two houses at the same price on the same street, one built in 1928 and one in 1978, are completely different projects. Here's what I brace fo...
There are a lot of vacant lots for sale in this city for a few thousand dollars, and every few months somebody buys a handful and then finds out why they were cheap. Since I build on them, here's the part that isn't in the listing. The land is almost never the expensive part. Everything between b...
There have been a lot of long-vacancy posts on here lately, and the advice almost always lands on the same two things: drop the rent or fire the PM. Sometimes that's right. But I do turns in this market for a living, and a big share of the houses I walk that "won't rent" are priced fine and marke...
Every failed HQS inspection in Memphis costs you the same thing: a re-inspection wait and usually a month of abatement or delayed HAP payments. After doing rent-ready turns on a lot of voucher units here, the same short list fails over and over, and almost all of it is cheap to fix BEFORE the ins...
I run a construction company here in Memphis and do a lot of investor rehabs and rent-ready turns, so I see the same few things wreck out-of-state budgets over and over. Sharing in case it saves someone a surprise: 1. Cast iron and galvanized plumbing. A lot of pre-1965 Memphis stock still has or...