Update for 2/26/2010

Here’s an end-of-the-week update on all the houses and other stuff going on…

House #1: The Corn House

We found out that the lease/buyers for this house haven’t been paying off their credit card each month like the credit repair company suggested. They likely would have qualified last month if it had not been for that, but now they’re likely still a month or two away, best case.

The contract for this lease-purchase expires this weekend, and we met with the buyers last night. We agreed to extend the contract one final time, until June 30 of this year. That means that if they can get the house closed, they’ll still qualify for the $8000 tax credit as well. If they can’t qualify by June, we’ve informed them that we won’t be extending again (we’ve already extended three times).

So, if this one isn’t sold by June 30, we’ll be taking the $7800 that we’ve collected in escrow money and using it to fix up the house and put it back on the market.

House #13: The Poor House

The buyers had their inspection earlier this week, and only came back with a few requests for minor issues (squirrels in the attic, minor shower leak, mis-wired outlet, etc). We are now just waiting for the appraisal to come back, and assuming everything is okay with that, we expect to get this one closed in the next two to three weeks.

House #14: The Pine House

Wow, this one has been a crazy rehab so far. We completely gutted the exterior, ripping off all the siding, trim, soffit, fascia, gutters, roof, and windows, rear deck, and replaced everything. In the process, we realized that there was some termite damage and wood rot to a couple support joists and that the entire chimney was rotted away. So, we replaced a couple beams and completely ripped off and replaced the chimney.

Once the exterior was finished, we brought in the mold remediation company who gutted the entire exterior, and had to remove about 50% of the sheetrock in the house for remediate the mold. It will take another day or two to finish the mold work, but starting next week, we will be rebuilding the interior.

Based on some surprises we’ve found (the extra structural work, the extra mold remediation, etc) we’re probably about $5K over budget on this one…which is too bad considering our profit was thin to begin with. We won’t know until we put it on the market, but hopefully we’ll be able to sell this one for our projected price, or we may be working on our first break-even project. The worst part about that is that this has been our biggest rehab to date, so it’s taking a lot of time and energy.

House #15: The Neighbor House

The buyers for this property are going through the process of trying to secure their loan. Their first lender couldn’t get the job done, but they’re confident that the second lender will.

Currently, the closing is scheduled for March 17.

House #16: The Probate House

This house has been on the market for nearly two weeks without an offer. We’ve had tremendous interest (as expected, given our pricing it well below market), but the very specific back-yard — it has a waterfall and lots of custom landscaping — and the fact that it’s on a main road have turned off several buyers. My wife has always believed that this house will be perfect for a couple with no kids (since there’s no good back yard play area) or a retired couple, and it’s becoming obvious that she’s absolutely right (as usual!).

We have two agents telling us that they have very interested buyers, but until we see an offer, it doesn’t really mean much.

In the meantime, there was a horrible smell coming from one of the back bedrooms in the house. We had our extermination company investigate, and they found a dead squirrel in the attic. The squirrel was probably in there when we were rehabbing the house, and our contractors probably sealed it in when they were replacing damaged fascia boards around the roof-line.

Poor little squirrel… 🙁

There’s plenty more going on with the staging business, the mobile home business, and other ventures we’re pursuing, but I’ll save that for future posts…