Rental House Update

In our last blog post I shared about a decision we made to purchase a house, update it, and rent it despite being a little reluctant. I thought I’d share an update now that we have renters moved in.

Renovation Recap

We spent a million weeks working on the house ourselves and overseeing contractors doing renovations inside. Not really a million but it felt like that. This went fairly smoothly, except for the times when zero work would happen for several days or when we had to make workers come back to redo sub-par work, or fix things they messed up.

Since this is a rental house, we were definitely trying to make cost-effective choices. And there were a lot of updates we wanted to do. In the end, we weren’t able to do them all upfront and stay in the budget, so we’ll phase in some more improvements over the next few years. At least we took care of major repairs, did lots of cleanup, and updated the style before renting.

Our goal was to spend six weeks getting the house updated and ready to rent. It ended up taking eight weeks. I wasn’t really excited about those two months without renters, especially while writing all the checks to plumbers, painters, tile and floor installers, and the A/C company. And during those eight weeks all of our free time was spent pulling weeds, power-washing, trimming trees, replacing light fixtures and smoke alarms, installing blinds, and cleaning. So those eight weeks were pretty long for everyone in the family! I was really proud of our kids for helping do so much of the work with minimal complaining, and it was really fun to teach them some new life skills as well.

Once we got the house listed, we had four applications in the first three days! Makes me feel like we could have priced it higher! We are using a management company (at least for our first tenants) since I’m sure I have a lot to learn about managing tenants. So far, I think Kaimey and I are both too controlling of personalities to hand things off to a company to truly manage for us. It still feels like we’re doing a lot of the work they should be doing due to their lack of attention to detail.

We expected things to quiet down for us once the work was done and tenants moved in. But on night TWO of the new family living there, an unexpected septic clog led to water backing up and flooding all over the floors from all of the plumbing fixtures. Seriously! Not the first impression we wanted our renters to have!

Now that all of the work is behind us and the septic issue is resolved (better be), we are hoping for things to be smooth-sailing from here. Fingers crossed.

Would We Do It Again?

So the question everyone asks: Would you do it again? Honestly I don’t know. I ended up really resenting those eight weeks of remodeling. We literally worked every evening and all weekend during that period. I found myself overwhelmed with the amount of work. I’m okay with that feeling as it happens often in my life. But typically I buckle down and work quickly until everything is done. That mentality didn’t really jive with also wanting to slow down, teach the kids, and let them practice skills. So it was a difficult balance between slowing down and knocking it out.

On that note, I think we kept too much of the work for ourselves.

• We spent too long doing touch-up paint before hiring a professional painter.
• The landscaping was a ton of work, and we should have hired a landscaping crew.
• The punch list was long and some items did not get completed. We should have had a handyman knock those out.
• We bit off more than we could chew, or at least wanted to chew.

So in retrospect, I would have hired out more of the remodel. Managing the crews that we did hire ended up being enough of a job in itself.

Also, as mentioned above, I have not loved the interaction with our management company so far. They haven’t given us the level of detail I feel we are paying for. We had multiple delays and mistakes when listing the house due to their oversights. And they actually told me at one point: “You know, we have other properties we are trying to manage at the same time. You are not our only customer.” What?? Yes, of course I know that! But if I ever told a client of mine they were getting inadequate service because I have other clients I’m trying to help too, I would expect them to fire me right then! I expect each of my clients to think, “I don’t know how I get this level of personal service from Scott when he has other clients he is helping too.” 

So we have some decisions to make about more updates and the management company when our contract is up.

Time will tell if this was a good decision financially. Hopefully it will be in the long run. All I do know is that the first rent check was eaten up (and then some) by commissions and repairs. So it’s still eating my income instead of producing income.

The bright side is that we have a great family living there. They moved from another state, and it was fun to leave them a little “Welcome to Texas” gift. Our prayer and hope all along was for the house to be a blessing to the family living there. Other than the septic clog and flood on their second night, we still hope that’s true.

I’m sure I’ll write more about the rent house in the future, but for now I need a break!