All Forum Posts by: Chris Vail

@Minka Sha I looked at probably 30-40 properties and made offers on 15-20 before I got the one I am working on renovating right now, and I did conventional financing.  Most of my offers I got told were to low and to up them if I wanted to compete, and I just told them the price I offered is my best unless they want to give me a counter offer.  It took me 6 months of looking and offers before I got one.  Just because you have money to spend doesn't mean you will get the property (this is how I felt), it can be discouraging but anything worth having is worth working / waiting to get.

Congrats @Glenn McCrorey !!!

Thanks @Account Closed I am an analyst by nature with a devil's advocate view point. Which generally means I spend a lot of time trying to see the other side of whatever it is I am looking at to see if there might be a surprise waiting for me on the other side. But even with that I am still hitting small bumps in the road as I move through this process. You just need to have the mentality that they are only bumps and they can be overtaken and will pass.

@Leyla Simsek 

No the price did not change, they ultimately just got less cash at the end of the deal as out of their potential profit the liens had to be paid. 

Leyla Simsek I believe this is something the will get squared away during title and escrow switch over. The house I just bought had a small lien from a utility company which got paid for out of the sellers profits on the house (they also had no money to put up for something like this). I don't think it is a deal breaker by any means as long as it is coverable during escrow. I am no expert, just my experience with something that sounds similar.

Tom Lane well done

@Jaago Viitkin 

Have you gotten bids from contractors yet?  That might be your best bet to get a true estimate from them.  If you are not sure where to start I recently put a job on Thumbtack.com and got a few contractors for a job I was working on.

@Pat McGrath I got bids that were all over the place as it seems not many folks understand  or are used to getting a full documented SOW to bid on it seems.  I used thumbtack.com to post what I was looking for and had 5 contractors respond to come out and do quotes (I also had two other contractors in addition come out and bid).  After I sent them the SOW and walked the property with them I got quotes ranging from around 8k just for labor and some rough materials to 31k for labor and rough materials.  The most professional quote I got back was the 31k but they were way over priced for what I had as a budget and I believe they do mostly homeowner / higher end projects and so they can charge higher end prices.

The concept of asking folks to put a bid together for labor and materials for different items seemed to be a foreign concept to some of them while others understood.  My advice is to get bids from a few different contractors and attempt to get them to bid on the same thing and even set up a template for them to fill out (this is the only thing I can think of after my experience) so that you can easily compare the quotes.  I had to take each quote and dissect them to see which one was better as some included some items in their quote while others omitted them and I wanted to make sure I was comparing apples to apples instead of apples to squash.

@Minka Sha This is north of 80 in North Sacramento

Updated renovation photos:

In process of taking out the infected Pine tree in the back yard.  These guys were extremely efficient and moved very quickly.

About ten minutes later

And then the next day:

I am amazed at how big the back yard feels now.

New picture from the front of the house, after the pine tree was removed and the palm tree trimmed.

Dry wall was getting installed today as well.  The plan is to have texture on the walls on Friday, so painting can start next week.

For those in the Sacramento area I am just glad the tree is down before the storm that is hitting us tonight/tomorrow.