All Forum Posts by: Jerry W.

@Jayden Hamilton, my cheap fix ups for value and appeal are new fixtures, the new bathroom or kitchen faucets or even shower units will really modernize many places.  Next new light fixtures and door knobs.  New paint and new color schemes are also relatively cheap and make stuff really stand out.  New countertops and new handles for cabinets can be cheap and look very nice unless the cabinets are in bad shape.  Flooring upgrades as simple as new carpet or some vinyl planking.  Grooming your bushes or flower beds is also cheap and adds curb appeal.  If you want to spend a bit more new appliances can give a place a very nice shine.  If you want more of course the kitchen and bathroom upgrades are best.  Putting new siding on a building can completely change the way it looks as well.  For a house I will live in I love new windows and high efficiency furnaces/A.C. and new appliances.  They make the home more efficient and fun to live in.

I listed these in order of cost, since you didn't give dollar values.  Some upgrades are only a few hundred for the whole house if you do it yourself, others are as much as $10K or more.

@Sam Fowler, here is my 2 cents, and it's worth what you paid for it.

First this is the weirdest metric I have ever seen in the Wyoming boom, bust economy.  I have seen a fair number of booms and busts.  This one is vastly different from any other boom I have ever seen.  House prices in WY mirror oil prices, oil goes up, jobs go up, house prices go up.  Oil prices go down, jobs and wages go down, and house prices go down.  Oil dropped below $0 for awhile in some places as they were paying for storage on things like oil tankers because they couldn't unload at a refinery as they were full from no one driving or flying and using fuel.  Despite that housing sales and prices spiked massively in WY, ID, ND, SD, UT, etc.  This is crazy.  Covid caused many jobs to become work from home and freed the high paying job from being tied to living in a metro area.  I am renting to folks from MN, NJ, CO, CA, etc.  This is nuts.  Housing prices will not be popping from a burst bubble for a long time.  With interest rates low, and demand high prices will remain high.  Lack of inventory, lack of builders, and lumber prices, copper prices, plastic prices all surging massively new houses are so expensive to build that value will remain in older houses until demand is slaked.  It takes less than 1.5% of folks from CA moving to WY to double it's population.  Housing costs are 1/10th of the cost in my area compared to CA.  Now that the job doesn't tether them there they will move to cheaper and less populated areas.

Another problem is that foreclosures have been held up due to the Covid rules.  That will most likely ease up soon, but it won't solve the housing shortage.  Oddly enough Covid has spurred another housing crisis of folks buying up short term rentals.  Houses are being converted to STRs.  Folks quit using Motels with lobbies that hundreds march through each day for SFRs that only they stay at.  Folks are underestimating the impact that had.  Look at the thousands of homes burned in the fires last year, and the many more destroyed by the record number of hurricanes.  Lake Charles was pretty much destroyed in LA.

No, no bubble, but it is weird and hard to predict.  @Kenton LeVay nailed the lack of a crystal ball problem.  We tend to look to see how things will turn out based upon how things went in similar situations in history.  We don't have anything close to a modern pattern to examine this time.  Black Swan events happen on a regular basis, but how they affect the market can be radically different.

My advice, is buy a ticket and enjoy the ride as best you can.  Don't be a spectator.  @Steve Vaughan put it well.  Figure out a strategy, maybe commercial, or self storage, maybe do a vacation rental, maybe go to building houses or developing land, just buy and flip on a massively more expensive scale like buying 800 sq ft one bedroom houses and adding 1500 sq ft to them.  Use your head, look for opportunity and go for it.  life is not a spectator sport.  Good luck and best wishes folks.

@Edward Mosqueda, the reason properties are so high right now is that they are almost impossible to find at anything close to reasonable.  If you do not have a property in mind or two that you can buy you might end up with no rental property.  If you keep it then you have a money making property that is rapidly appreciating.  Only sell if you can actually know you can buy more properties that will do better than your current one.  Good luck either way and kudos for things going so well with you.

@Nathan Gesner, I am slightly embarrassed that I have never set limits on my rentals.  There is a prohibition of discriminating against people having children, but I have never said no children in an add or in person.  I do ask who will be living there and my lease is very specific that they must list the name and age of every occupant, and it does not allow the addition of another tenant without permission.  All adults must be approved in advance.  I sometimes get lazy on checking out the new adult as carefully as the first adults to rent.  To be honest I have more problems with parties splitting up as I do with new adults coming in.  I do hate adult children moving in, it rarely works out.

I only run 2 units and have had problems with double booking.  My most recent was an over lap of one day on a longer stay.  Luckily I had the other unit open and they agreed to free upgrade to it.  I actually lost my superhost status over a double booking that occurred when my town's internet went down for a day, when it came back on I was double booked.  I looked to see who booked first and told the other party the problem, and cancelled the last booking, and promptly lost my superhost status.  I now double check every booking immediately myself.  I wish I had too many so I was unable to do this, but I have set AIR BnB to autobook on my best house and permission only with AIR BnB.  I do like the guests I get from VRBO better than from AIR BnB, but AIR BnB outbooks the other by better than 3 to 1.  I really wish VRBO would have cohosts like AIR BnB, that has been a huge help in guest requests and cleaning.

I have had a higher number of folks booking then cancelling a few days later.  It is odd, like they cannot make up their mind about going on vacation.  I have also had a large number of calls or texts like do you have a covered casserole dish, tin foil, plastic saran wrap, virgin olive oil, a colander, etc.  

I have also had my regular great clients that are so nice and friendly like they are all old friends.

Hey @Joe Villeneuve, I use a line of credit instead of a bank account also, but @Amandeep Singh Bassi was asking how much you set aside when analyzing a property.  Aman, I use 2 methods.  I calculate 10% for maintenance, 5% for cap ex costs, and 8% for vacancy, the other method is to judge the condition of the property and figure out from there,  If it needs a lot of work I make sure it has a minimun of $100 for month for repairs. 

@Nicholas Jaeger, welcome to BP bud and hello from Thermopolis WY

@Eric Weldon-Schilling, your statement is wrong on so many levels that it is scary. Please read Atlas Shrugged, which was written by a woman who was forced to grow up in communism and escaped. If landlords cannot evict for failure to pay rent, how long before that housing falls apart? No money to paint, replace flooring, replace broken windows, fix roof leaks, broken toilets, repair electrical issues? If car companies could collect payments for selling cars or repair costs, how long would it be before they quit making cars and parts? If grocery stores could not stop shoplifters from taking all the food they want and not pay, how long until grocery stores quit selling groceries? If medical institutions could not collect for delivering babies, doing surgery, or even just seeing sick kids, in a few years people would quit being doctors and nurses. Imagine a world where kids die from the flu, ear infections, or where kidney stones, bad gall bladders and appendicitis are death penalties? If you don't pay people for the fruits of their labor they quit working. No one will ever buy a run down house and fix it up to rent if tenants don't have to pay rent. Would you allow someone to move into your house free of charge and live there forever? Would you allow people to take your vehicle and leave you with no way to go to work because you seem rich to them? How about eat your food if they are hungrier than you? How long will power plants run if no one pays for electricity? I could go on forever.

@Cassidy Burns, what I like best about these kinds of posts is people letting themself dream and verbalize how they are going to pursue their dream.  I wonder how many of the folks posting had this be their first time they have written their goal down?  Thank you for posting this thread.  I posted on your first page, but was unable to reply to your questions due to the mass of folks posting here.

While I cannot recall your questions exactly, I already have a line of credit, I expanded it from one house to cover 2 houses so my credit line doubled.  I don't need to Have $125K in funds to buy new properties, because I use the line of credit to buy, then rehab, then after 6 months seasoning I simply refinance usually for the full amount of purchase and rehab, or at least nearly all of it.  I just got this great thing going and added 4 or 5 properties over the last few years and now we get out first Sellers market and everyone from out of state are buying up houses and driving up prices.  Rents are moving up, but it is hurting locals as out of state renters are coming into town and paying more.  I have jumped rents on turnover properties for the first time since 2014.  I also bought and am fixing up 2 mobile homes since my housing market is out of kilter.  I am trying one other novel idea and will be doing an offer on a junky, small downtown commercial building to turn into a vacation rental.  Lets see if being 30 seconds from the bars and restaurants will offset being in a nice house in a quiet neighborhood.