Here’s something new: 2/1 singlewide trailer, Asking price: $10,000

From MLS: Small unrestricted, commercial/residential lot with mobile on opposite side the street from refinery parking lot. Has many possibilities, Owner will entertain any/all offers.

At this price, just how hideous *is* this place?

No skirt, no stairs… are the utilities hooked up?

Really doesn’t look too bad… the description says the trailer was just moved on the lot.

Hard to tell from the photos, but I’m not seeing a driveway or carport. Anyone working at the plant would want both.

If this is located where I think, then this picture’s been carefully cropped to best advantage.

This one’s going to require a very quick look. The ‘opposite side of the street from the refinery parking lot’ is pretty awful, but the refineries are doing extremely well and a furnished trailer close by could bring in excellent cashflow… perhaps $500/month? And ‘owner will entertain all offers’ is always a good sign.

No address listed, so I’ll have to call our RE agent in the morning before making a drive-by. At this price, its definitely worth investigating.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tags: cashflow, investment, investment property, real estate, trailer, trailers with land

Some mysterious rhinovirus decided to pay the Brz Clan  a long-term visit this holiday season and while I’ve always enjoyed company, this is getting silly. Several articles are waiting in the pipeline, ready to publish just as soon as the fog clears long enough to do some serious editing, but in the meantime, this cold is a good excuse to look for other real estate and/or investment blogs.

Unfortunately, the search has been a little disappointing. So– if you have a recommendation, could you please comment below and post a link? Or send an email to cmbrz@conniebrz.com.

And I bet you thought I wanted Kleenex

Tigger’s the only one without the sniffles…wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t keep rubbing it in.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Tags: blogs, investment, real estate

A Little Demolition Goes a Long Way

Floorplan: Before

And After:

A few days back, I took my friend Marc over to see our latest project. Not only is he a great guy, he’s also looking for a place to rent and we’ve been trying to wrangle him into one of ours for a while. He’s also blunt– a valuable trait in a friend.

While I was busy pointing out the new utility room, siding, windows, fixtures and other neat-o stuff, Marc was busy turning in circles, staring blankly around the room and obviously not paying a bit of attention to my witty repartee. I’ve seen this look on his face before. As Mr. Free says, ‘the gears were turning.’

“I’d knock this out… it’s totally useless. Then someone might actually be able to arrange their furniture.”

Oops…

‘This’  is a little half-wall partition, jutting out about three feet into the living room. Its ugly. Every visit to the house, someone would grab a pole, give it a shake and say, “we’ve got to do something about this.” But nothing was done– and ‘this’ kept slipping through the editing process.

As soon as Marc spoke, I saw the invisible couches, chairs, and tables he was so busy arranging in his head and he was absolutely right. With ‘this’ removed, the kitchen pantry lined up perfectly with the living room wall, giving the combination living/dining room a nice, rectangular shape.

It took Mr. Brz about 10 minutes to remove ‘this”… major improvement for such a small amount of effort. And a reminder that furniture arrangement is important to tenants.

 From now on, we’re inviting Marc over before getting started

Yanking down the decorative thingies

Half-wall is down and, fortunately, it looks like this partition was an after-thought

You can see that the pantry and living room wall line up perfectly– and that the pantry was finished out all the way to the floor. Mr. Brz’s pulling nails with his favorite tool.

Pulling up the boards nailed to the concrete took the longest. You can see the original flooring under the boards.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: demolition, floorplan, investment, real estate, Rehab

If These Floors Could Talk

The little house we’re completing now is one of my favorites. The first time we snuck inside, tiptoed through the fallen ceiling tiles while dodging the dead wasps on the floors, I knew this ratty little shack was going to be a keeper.

Repo’s are generally a mess. Holes in the sheetrock, exposed plumbing, missing doors, drawers and hardware… anyone who’s looked at a few knows what I mean. This one was *really* something. Mr. Brz and I have poked fun at the odd construction of the house, the non-square-ness of every door, window and corner, the way the roof slants 3 inches from one side of the house to the other. We snickered, speculated, and laughed ourselves silly. What were they thinking? Just how drunk were they when they framed this window? As you can tell, we’re just a barrel of laughs.

Then we pulled up the old flooring.

Underneath we found this… do you see it?

How about now?

And now after much photoshopping?

The rope swing on the hackbark tree out front should’ve tipped us off.

Real people, real dreams, real troubles, real sad.

I’m planning to be kinder in the future to the unknown former owners of the homes we’re rehabilitating.

And I’m going to say a little prayer for Michael, LeAnn and Joshua… wherever they are.

Note: I wrote a series of articles on the Magnolia house for RenoNation at www.Atticmag.com. If you’d like a visual, start to finish, click here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: investment, real estate, Rehab, renovation

At this point, all I’ve got is a tenacious notion somewhere in this vicinity:

• Paying off truck/tractor=good idea
• Investing 30K=much better idea

Reality? I have 4 months to find and acquire an asset producing positive cashflow after expenses of $750/month. But to get from here to there, I’ve got to leave the realms of speculation and see what’s available.

 Idea #1

Buy a mobile home on land. These are readily available in our area and finding something under $30K is definitely possible. To bring in enough cash each month, the trailer would have to be 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms with a garage or carport and located in a school district with higher potential rent.  We’re not afraid of mobile homes–lived in one for years. Upkeep is minimal and repairs are inexpensive. However, they simply do not appreciate and we can count on offering owner financing once we’re ready to sell.

Idea #2

Look for a nicer 3/2/2 that will cashflow $750/month with a 30K  down payment. This is possible, but unlikely. So far we’ve never found a single house that will cashflow this much. Checking foreclosures might yield something, but no breath-holding allowed.

Idea #3

Buy 3 smaller homes, each with a 10K down payment that will cashflow at least $250 each. This is a better possibility, but more involved and might take a year to find all three homes… doesn’t exactly fit our timeframe. Finding some way to speed the process could make this work.

Idea #4

Look for a multiplex and use the $30K as a down payment. These rascals are few and far between although I know of one that might work– a six-plex with an unhappy out-of-town owner.

Time to run some numbers and check the listings :-) 

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: asset, assets, cashflow, foreclosures, investment, liabilities, liability, mobile homes, real estate

We hate consumer debt.

Besides the mortgage on our personal residence, we try to pay cash for anything that isn’t going to make money for us. So imagine our surprise when we found ourselves owing a combined total of 30K on a Toyota Tundra and a brand new Kubota tractor (she said, tongue planted firmly in cheek)

But unfortunately, dear space pals, there’s no such thing as public transportation in the country and acreage requires a bushhog. So for the last couple of years, we’ve forked out a combined payment of $750/month for these two lovely liabilities. I don’t like it and Mr. Brz keeps forgetting they aren’t paid for, which is rather annoying as he panics anew every time he finds out. Picture someone learning they have cancer on the first and fifteenth of every month and you’ll get the general idea.

So for my own sanity, I’ve undertaken a mission to rid us of this scourge and with some fancy finagling involving bonus checks, income tax refunds and rainy day savings, we should have the cash to pay off the balance by March of ’08.

Sometimes old programming dies hard 

I’ve been licking my proverbial chops at this delightful eventuality for weeks now. My trusty business calculator comes out and I figure and re-figure how lovely the checkbook balance will look sans nasty vehicular payments. I’ve added up the number of payments between now and then (that would be 10 bi-weekly payments on the truck of $175 and 5 tractor payments of $400, the number of years left on each (3 for the truck, 4 for the tractor), added, subtracted, and compounded ad nauseam.

It’s been too much fun.

Then it hits me—We are big-shot real estate investors now. What on earth am I doing using 30K *cash* to pay off liabilities?

Slowly, painfully, my pitiful little brain cells creak through the possibilities of this new way of thinking.

• Old Way:
  • Pay off debts.
  •  Increase monthly cashflow by $750.
  • Pat self on back and exude smugness throughout the next 3-4 years whenever remembering scrimping, saving and eventual triumphant debt-free-ness.

• New Way:
  • Find asset for 30K that generates positive cashflow of $750/month.
  • Pay tractor and truck note using new stream of income.
  • Continue receiving $750/month long after liabilities are paid off (Can anyone say, “College Tuition?”)
  • Feel very silly for almost falling back into old financial management rut.

Will it work? 

Of course the sticking point is finding a $30K asset that will generate $750/month positive cashflow. But just for grins, let’s pretend we can. Here’s how this imaginary scenario could play out.

(By the way—in my Happy Place everything is possible. By starting with this positive outlook, my rational mind is not allowed to edit out any brilliant baby ideas before they have time to grow up into realistic plans that will make us money. Does every idea work? Not on your life… but in my Happy Place, negativity is suspended and everything’s given an equal chance to germinate)

Let’s pretend we find a house for $25K.  (Don’t laugh too hard… we bought our last place for $25.5K)

Let’s say the house needs $5K in repairs for a total of $30K. (What an amazing coincidence! That’s just how much we have to invest~!)

Now, after careful research, we find that said house will rent for $950/month.

Expenses on this place will run $250/month leaving positive cashflow of $750/month.

Okay fine… but here’s where this gets interesting. After 4 years, the truck and tractor are paid for—but the silly little investment house doesn’t know that. It just keeps on generating that same $750/month… year after year after year. The value of the house increases (hopefully), but even if it doesn’t, we can still sell and get our original 30K back.

However, let’s pretend that by the time the truck/tractor notes are history, we have such an overstuffed portfolio of rentals that we decide to sell and carry back owner financing.

Here’s how this could work out:

• Purchase price: $30K

• Selling Price: $60K

• $3000 down payment

• Principle balance of: $57K

• 8% interest, 15 years

• Note: $545/month

• If the buyer pays the entire 15 years, the total received would be:

• $98, 100

• Or, we can just keep the house and keep pulling in the positive cashflow from rents month after month after month… not bad for a 30k initial investment.

So again… will it work? I guess we’ll have to step out of our Happy Place to find out J

If you’d like to see how we’re doing, check back occasionally and click on Tractor/Truck Challenge.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tags: assets, investing, investment, liabilities, owner finance, real estate