by Tom | Jun 18, 2009 | Hat Trick House, Marketing
The Hat Trick House is finally done and officially on the market and in MLS. We’ve had a swarm of buyers throughout the rehab and 3 great offers before it was even finished. We went 9% over budget but luckily our estimated sales price is surprisingly up 25% due to market conditions! Our list price is $359,000, this will be the highest sale in our area and set a new high comp if it sells for that price. My wife and I staged the house and it’s all ready for an advertised open house this Saturday. We already had one showing today, one scheduled for tomorrow morning and an agent that sold another one of our properties (The Abandonded House) just called and her “picky” client found it today on Realtor.com and wants to see it. The agent from our first showing today said the master bedroom closet alone would sell the house. Really? Can’t wait to see how this weekend turns out and get all the feedback. According to the Brookings Institution San Antonio was ranked THE strongest metropolitan area for economic performance in the wake of a recession for the whole nation for Q1 09. Top 5 cities mentioned in the report are San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Austin, Houston and Dallas.
by Tom | Sep 16, 2008 | Marketing, Wholetailing
We have some good news and bad news. First the good news, we sold Bungalow #2 to another investor after putting it in MLS and getting a lot of interest on it, this is called Wholetailing.
All cash offer, it closes next week and we got the price we wanted. This 2-week deal will net us a 25% return on our investment and all I did was pressure wash it, take out the carpets and mow the grass. We were able to make a decent profit and still leave some on the table for the next guy.
Had I not already been working on a rehab across the street I wouldn’t have run across this deal. It wasn’t on the market for sale, was not vacant, and according to the neighbors the owner would never sell it and I still took it down. This goes to show that perseverance is the key.
Our rehabbed house, The Craftsman Bungalow is still for sale. Although the first offer we received didn’t work out we are still averaging over 5 showings per week. It’s been on the market 33 days now. No sweat, it will sell. It only takes 1 buyer. As long as we keep getting the traffic we are getting, I am not worried.
The bad news is Hurricane Ike hit Houston pretty hard last weekend and flooded my mom’s house so my wife and I loaded up the truck with a generator, fans, water and gasoline and headed over to Houston to help Mom out.
I had to pull up all the carpets as there was about 2” water in the whole house and had to cut down several large elm trees that had also fallen on the home. It’s a real natural disaster, there are no gas stations open, still no power in her home and a citywide curfew imposed until this mess gets worked out.
Galveston got hit a lot harder, my mom also owns a couple properties down there, both of which seemed to make it through with just some minor flooding. Thank God it wasn’t worse and nobody got hurt, houses can always be fixed.
by Tom | Sep 3, 2008 | Craftsman Bungalow, Marketing, Wholetailing
After 19 days on the market and 15 showings we finally received our first offer on The Craftsman Bungalow. We are getting great feedback and have had tons of showings personally to buyers driving around without an agent.
This offer was from a lovely young couple who are first time home buyers and not represented by an agent, thus saving us 3%. They still came in about 10% below our asking price, not a bad offer if we were your typical homeowner sitting here with years of equity but since this is an investment property for us, that 10% would represent a nice chunk of our potential profit. We countered their offer over the weekend so we’ll see if they are able to come up a bit. I have a feeling they were stretching already but we’ll see.
In other great news we closed on our next house last week as well. It’s actually on the same street as the other house but larger at about 1550 sf. As I worked everyday on the Craftsman Bungalow I noticed there was another vacant house 4 doors down.
I asked the neighbors what the story was, all of them telling me that the owner lives out of state but would never sell. One neighbor actually firmly instructed me not to contact him because it would be a waste of time because even if he did decide to sell he had promised the house to this guy’s daughter.
Did I listen to the neighbors? Of course not. I made contact and ended up closing the deal at 51% ARV. The day we closed I put it in MLS wholetail at 70% ARV and we’ve had about 8 showings already on this “Bungalow #2.” We figured we would throw it out there for a few weeks and see if we get any bites and if not our plans are to rehab this as our next project.
