Update for 12/27/10

Things have been pretty busy personally (we’re getting ready to have our second baby in a couple weeks), so I haven’t had a lot of time to update the blog, but I wanted to give a general update on the four properties we are currently holding…

House #1: The Corn House

It’s been almost two years now, and we still have our lease purchase tenants in The Corn House. Their option contract was scheduled to expire on December 31, but we just signed an extension through the end of the first quarter of next year (March 31, 2011). Since they pay their rent and option/escrow payments on-time every month, we’re happy to let them maintain their option to purchase for as long as it takes to get their credit in order — as long as they continue to improve their credit as well.

I plan to pull their credit again in January, so we should get a good idea of where they are financially, and will have a good idea of whether they will be able to buy the house in 2011. Based on the last credit pull, they shouldn’t be more than 6 months away.

House #18: The Hassle House

The Hassle House has been rented for about two months now, and while the tenant is somewhat picky and demanding, she’s a good tenant and has paid her rent on-time each of the first two month. In fact, she’s paid by the 1st of the month both times, and both times paid by depositing the rent directly into my bank account, making the process very easy on me.

House #19: The Flood House

The Flood House is still under contract. The buyers had their inspection last week, and we still haven’t gotten any feedback — hopefully we’ll get a copy of the inspection report in the next day or two, and if the buyers are planning to ask for any repairs or additional work, I imagine we’ll hear from them this week — their due diligence period expires on Saturday night at midnight.

We’ve also spoken to the buyer’s mortgage broker — they didn’t want to use ours — and are confident that they should be able to handle the fact that the property will be subject to the 90 Day Rule. It appears the lender — Wells Fargo in this case — has done properties in under 90 days before, so hopefully there won’t be any surprises there.

Also, according to the mortgage broker, the (first) appraisal has been ordered for the property, so we’re hoping to get that done this week as well.

House #20: The Lake House

The Lake House is still sitting about half-staged. We decided to wait until after the new year to list this one for sale, as we don’t expect to get any traffic through there this week and want to get the impact of a new listing once buyers start getting back out there in 2011.

So, we’ll finish the staging at some point this week and put the property on the MLS either next weekend or the beginning of next week.