It has been a week, huh? As we all adjust to the new normal of staying in and adapting our routines, I tried to keep a bit of normal in my schedule and work on the projects I had the supplies for (since nearly all of my time is being spent at home, of course).

The first of the trees began budding this week, and it seems that a long awaited spring is just on the horizon. It’s so close, I can feel it! This last week was a busy one. We started off last Saturday with a move in on the smoke rehab unit. We’re really excited to have a new tenant and we’re thrilled to be done with that unit. Something about that project just seemed to drag on and on, perhaps because it was our third renovation on the same floor plan in the last year. I know Grayson and I both wish we would have had the budget to replace the vanities, redo the kitchen, and lay new flooring downstairs, but between the money for the supplies for those projects and the vacancy cost to do the work, it just wasn’t in the cards. Our new tenant seems excited about the fence we just had installed, because she has a little pup. We’ll have to get around to putting in grass seed and staining the fence and stairs once the weather turns better for the season, but for now we’re just enjoying knowing that we no longer have rotting decks that could be a potential safety hazard hanging off the back of the building.

Last weekend we also took the time to interview a property manager. When we first started investing, we knew we’d want to hand the day-to-day operations off to a company because we wanted our focus to be on investing, not on starting a business. Unfortunately the buildings were in worse condition than we had originally thought, which meant there wasn’t any room in the budget for a manager. Besides that, we were living in the first building and then moved into the second building, so it seemed silly to hire a manager when we were already on site 24/7. But the other day we both came to the realization that it’s time to start looking at passing them off, so we’ve begun searching for the best property manager for our needs. It’ll be a few more months before we can sign the dotted line and bring them on, but just knowing that more free time is on the horizon already makes us both feel better.

The bulk of the last week was spent planning for our upcoming refinance. We refinanced our first fourplex in January for a rate reduction, and we’re hoping to close on the refinance for this second one within the next few weeks. The first one was pretty simple – since it was just a rate reduction with our current lender, we didn’t have to do much aside from some paperwork. This second one seems a bit more involved (although that’s all Grayson’s domain, so I’m happy to just watch from the sidelines on this). Our second building was bought using a portfolio loan, which pretty much just means we asked a local bank to give us the loan with a low down payment and they said, “Sure, as long as you live in it for a year and we can adjust (most likely increase) the rate in a few years!”. Since we only bought the building in October, we’re still within that one year window of having to live here, but thanks to the fact that we bought this property cheaper off market (helloooo no competition driving up the price) and that we’ve now added significant value, increased the rents to match market rates, and have comparable sales from the local area for prices MUCH higher than we bought ours, our building should be worth a lot more than our original loan amount. All of this boiled down just means that we put 5% down at closing, you need 20% to refinance, and we think we’ve met that 20% by making the property better, making it match the value of the buildings around us. In order to prove that, we’ll have to have an appraiser come inspect the building, so now we’re rushing to finish up all the small details in our unit that we put off to tend to tenants’ needs and requests. But hopefully after this goes through, we can buy a home of our own and open this beautiful unit up to another family!

So if you need us, we’ll be spending the next couple days installing and painting doors (ah, peace and quiet and separation that a door brings, I’ve missed you), finishing up the trim, checking off the long list of small tasks to bring this place into the 21st century, and practicing our safe social distancing from the rest of the world.