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Tag Archives: Austin

We say, “Hmm,” and Think about the Future

What’s this? See the end of this post!

We get lots and lots of questions about why we do or don’t do certain things. We appreciate that folks are taking an interest in our real estate acquisition strategy and our renovation plans. Why not share some answers, then?

Why aren’t you buying houses near downtown Austin?

There are a couple of reasons for this. While the properties do continue to appreciate, it’s our opinion that the prices are being driven up by investors who are not actually out to make money. Like what? First, many people who reside outside the US invest in real estate as a safe way to “park” their money, and aren’t concerned too much about the cost. Second, there are many “investors” who are willing to pay retail price for a house to renovate, betting on rising home prices to enable them to make a profit. We simply don’t want to compete with those people. The market will not go up forever, and it’s due to come back down (as we have been saying for years, now).

Why aren’t you investing in multi-family properties in Austin?

See the above. The bargain properties have all been snapped up, fixed up, and renovated to get higher rents. My own son lives in one of those. The investors did a very reasonable job getting the units looking better without spending too much money (the kitchen cabinets look to have been repainted about ten times). We prefer to look outside the big city and the large suburbs and find properties in more-fringe communities, where you can still get a good price and make a good profit after fixing up a multi-family property. Continue reading →

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And U Add an ADU

Hermit Haus Logo

I love MY tiny house!

(for the alliteration)

The way home prices are changing in Austin, most investors understand that the best, maybe only, way to add value to an investment property is either to add to the square footage or add an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU).

Sierra and I recently attended the tiny home jamboree, mostly because we’re both fascinated with the concept and minimalst living. Our hands-down favorite was Pin Oak Tiny Homes. 

While there are actually many ways to invest in tiny homes, it’s not something that Hermit Haus has really looked into. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be talking about a tiny home on a foundation (not on a trailer with wheels, which would technically be considered an RV).

This very tiny house constitutes an RV. It’s fixed up like a house on the inside. It’s also for sale, so PM Sue Ann for more info.

Austin says:

Continue reading →

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The Bobcat Awakens with a Growl

Bobcat? There’s a blog post about Bobcat? If you’re a long-time reader of our blog, or one of our Facebook friends, this will seem like a blast from the past. But, hooray, hooray, it’s a blast to the future now.

house named bobcat

Here’s the original photo of the house when it was for sale. For a long time.

Backstory for New Readers

The Bobcat Lair house was the deal of a lifetime. We got this house from an estate, and it had been sitting empty for a long, long time. However, it had been maintained, so it was not falling apart; rather it was a tribute to the wallpapers and appliances of the 1980s. Want to see them? Here’s a link to Facebook photos of the house “before.” Believe me, we wish we could have kept those parquet floors. They were high quality ones…but a leaking window had ruined some, and they no longer manufacture that style.

The house is on a steep hill (Cat Mountain in Austin), and is part of what once was a condominium complex but is now a neighborhood of zero-lot-line homes with community maintenance of the outdoor spaces (that’s how the house stayed looking so good). The idea behind getting this property was that Sue Ann could live in it, with a friend, and it could be her Austin base while she still has her high-tech job there. It’s a more manageable size than her house in the suburbs, and closer to her kids and the fun restaurants and activities in Austin. Once Sue Ann no longer needs it, it will provide us with a lot more investment capital or retirement income. Win!

But. We got the house at a great price for a reason. No one would buy it due to an easement issue stemming from the weird way the neighborhood utilities were installed originally—under a whole row of houses, including our Bobcat Lair. People knew that easement issues mean trouble in the Austin market. The City of Austin process was horrible. And they were in no hurry to give us the right to have our house hang over the utility easement. Here is our earlier post about this:

While waiting for our permits, we did put on a new roof, renovate two bedrooms and a downstairs bathroom, and repair the crumbling decks. We also did the demolition to prepare for the renovation and bought most of the fixtures and appliances.

After the 1.5-year wait for permits, we realized all the money we’d planned to use for that house was tied up in our other projects, so we had to patiently wait out the flooding and inspection-related delays in the Casita project. Guess what? That project is finished!

Bobcat is awakening and becoming a new kitty! Hear her roar!

(As you read along, I’ll refer to photos in the gallery at the bottom of the post.)

The Update

permit

Look, a building permit. It’s worth its weight in gold.

With shiny building permits in hand, our beleaguered contractor finally got to work on the project. We have new blueprints for the renovation, and are really excited to watch our ideas come to life. Here are some pictures and descriptions of what is going on, so far.

First, we got rid of two sets of doors in the living area. Yes, there used to be FOUR exits (Photo 1). This is going to make arranging furniture a lot easier, and the new windows blend in seamlessly with what was there already (Photo 2). We aren’t losing any of the wonderful light in the space, just doors. The new windows are trimmed in the same cedar as the rest of the exterior, so it will look like it was built that way all along once painted (Photo 3—outside of windows). And the new doors will be painted to match the new front door, which also has a nice window in it for light (Photo 4, front door). The other doors, upstairs and down, have blinds in them (photo 5).

Downstairs we did the same thing, replacing two doors with one in each existing bedroom, but adding a window to keep light coming in (Photos 6 and 7).

Next, we tore down the kitchen wall and eliminated the hallway that used to go to the powder room and laundry room. Now there’s just one door, which leads to the laundry room, with the powder room at the end of that room. That gives us a lot more counter space and room for an island. We eliminated some walls by the entry, which will have an eating bar area instead. That will make the living/dining/kitchen area one big “open concept.” That’s what buyers seem to love. They also love gray and white, so guess what colors the kitchen will be? Sigh. But there are some black counters and dark gray ones, too (Photo 8).

Heading downstairs there was some unused space under the place where we bumped out the laundry room. Our contractor had the idea to make it a little closet, perfect for storing suitcases and the like. Brilliant! Every house needs more storage (Photo 9).

Now, down at the bottom is where we are having fun. The house originally had a large unfinished storage area beneath it, with an exterior door. In the early renovation, we added a door to that area from the house. Now we are building a bedroom suite there. It has a nice new door and its own window where there used to be a ventilation fan (Photo 10). In a roommate situation, that gives the roommate their own entry and exit area. There is a large closet and a over-sized bathroom to go with that bedroom, as well. There will be nice stairs and a small patio for that entrance.

On the other side of the stairs was more unfinished area. We are building a small office with built-in bookcases and desks, and two nice new windows. It will be where the members of our team do our Hermit Haus Renovation work. (Photos 11 and 12).

And finally, there is the BONUS room. The architect thought we might as well use all the space under the main house, so he designed a wine cellar off the office. It’s in a cave, already, so perfect for wine storage! If there’s space, we hope to put a little bistro set in there for wine tastings. So elegant! (Also probably mostly empty for a while, since we have a lot of wine storage at the ranch, and we aren’t THAT much of oenophiles! But that will be a fun selling feature in the future, we think (Photo 13).

As you can see, there’s still a ways to go on all this. The downstairs is a lot of dirt and rocks. But the new windows make it all seem more real. And there is always the view off the deck. That’s the best (Photo 14, view).

We will be posting regular updates and sharing lessons we learn as we continue on the longest renovation process ever! To be honest, this house is going to be so pleasant that it’s been worth the wait. It’s only been going up in value as it sits there, and it will be a pleasant place to spend time for the next few years.


The end!

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Perseverance Pays Off

Back of the house

The back of the Bob Cat house showing the two porches that overhang the utility easement.

Some projects take longer than others.

Different cities have different cultures.

I think everyone will agree to those two statements, and I, too, would’ve agreed when we started the Bob Cat Run project more than a year ago. I just didn’t realize how much the second statement could affect the first.

When we purchased Bob Cat Run in September of 2014, everything looked great on paper. We approached it from the standpoint of a homestead flip for Sue Ann and me. (I’ll explain the concept of homestead flipping in a future blog post. For now, the important consideration is that we planned to make Bob Cat our primary residence for at least two years.)

There was only one small problem. One small corner of the house protruded into the utility easement, and the back porches overhung it.

The Bob Cat house is surrounded by rich people's houses.

This killer view from the main wrap-around porch is one of the reasons we know we will eventually have a winner.

Everywhere else I’ve worked, this would not be a big deal for a house that was built in the 1980s and stood vacant for more than a decade, especially since it was built in an unincorporated area.  Most county inspectors (where they exist at all) would simply have noted the encroachment on the paperwork, and we would have moved on.  At worst, we would have paid some kind of “fee” or “fine,” and that would have been the end of the problem. I have never seen this kind of problem take longer than a few weeks and a couple of thousand dollars to work around.

The real problem started when the City of Austin annexed the subdivision. It got much worse when Austin implemented a Geographic Information System (GIS) a few years back. As one city employee put it, “Until then, we knew that these problems existed, but we didn’t have a way to track them.  Now, we have to do something about it.”

Well, when a city decides it has to “do something about it,” havoc ensues. The easement “belongs to” 13 separate city departments. Twelve of them looked at the degree of encroachment, not even enough for a closet, and agreed with us that it was no big deal. The water department, however, went into a tizzy and stopped the permitting progress. We have been negotiating with the city ever since. In the interim, we have accrued more than $12,000 in additional holding costs, almost all of it in city taxes. We were literally paying them to screw us over. And let’s not even think about opportunity costs.

A city manager who is part of this process explained it thus, “We know of thousands of people in the same boat as you are. You are just the first ones who have gone all the way through the process legally to enable us to develop a procedure for handling it.”  Great.  No good deed goes unpunished.

But, in the gripping hand, my dad used to say, “If it was easy, everybody would do it.” Persistence really does pay off…eventually.

The good news is that yesterday, we signed paperwork with the city that should bring this nightmare to an end.  I would like to thank the team at the city who have been working with us to resolve this issue.  I hope I will soon be reporting on the progress we’re making on Bob Cat.

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