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Tag Archives: Rentals

Getting Travis 1 Ready to Be a Home

The tub works, but it’s not pretty, and that weird painted window also leaks. Bye.

One of the Hermits’ Rest Enterprises big projects was a group of houses on the main drag in Cameron, Texas. Our office is in the big house. Currently Mandi is living in one of the other houses, which we will rent out once she moves to her next place in a few months. A third house we sold to folks whose relatives once lived there, and it’s getting fixed up. The final house is Travis 1. We hadn’t rented it out yet, because we’d wanted to fix the bathroom up a bit more.

That’s a good thing, because Sue Ann had a sister in Florida whose rent kept going up while her fixed income was not budging. She needed to be in a place with a lower cost of living and closer to family. Hey, we had a house! So, it’s been decided that Canova will join our crew in Cameron, and take up residence in Travis 1.

Before she arrives at the end of this month, we knew we had to get the remaining renovations complete. So, we found a new local contractor who was dying to help us out on the project, and set him to work over the weekend. We have our fingers crossed that at least the most important things get done!

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Rental Portfolio Progress

One of our goals is to provide quality rental housing at an reasonable price. To meet that goal, we look for potential rentals with an ARV somewhere around three times the median income for the neighborhood.

—with Lee Bruns

We think it’s important to have a diversified real estate investment strategy, so we have rental properties in addition to the houses we buy for rehabbing and resale. Carol and Russell have their own portfolio of rental properties, and Lee and I also have some. This is in addition to the rental properties we are building up for Hermit Haus Redevelopment.

We spend a lot of time working together and providing feedback on our rental properties. As I’ve mentioned before, many of them have had air conditioning issues this summer, and there have been other issues causing team members or specialists we hire to run around the state keeping the properties up. Russell enjoys using his handyman skills and does a lot of the repairs himself.

On happy bit of news came this week when we found new tenants to move into Villa Park 1, a big family to fill the house, which is great.  It’s a nice house, and we’re glad to have folks in there. Now we just need a renter for the rear unit, where Anita and I lived. Continue reading →

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What Makes a Good Rent House?

Happy Monopoly Money Man

Rental properties build wealth…if you choose them wisely.

We all agree that one of the main goals of real estate investing is passive income, and you can only generate that through owning rental properties. Rental properties can generate multiple income streams. But, assuming you don’t have the leverage to buy a multi-million dollar apartment community, how do you know if a house will make a good rental property? I have a few simple guidelines that let me know.

  • The Affordability Guideline
  • The 1% Rule
  • The Appreciation Guideline
  • The Market Appropriateness Guideline

In this post, I’ll go over each of these guidelines and then show you how we applied them to two of our current projects. Continue reading →

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Re-thinking the Meadow Arbors

Amazing work done on this fireplace.

Number 1

For some reason, the Meadow Arbor 1 house in San Antonio didn’t get all that many nibbles, even with a price change. So, we decided to go back to our original buy and hold strategy and try to rent it out, some time in the middle of last month.

After a bit of a lull, interest in the house picked up, and as of this week, we have found a renter who met all of our requirements, and have a signed lease.

The income will be helpful over the next year or two, and we have hopes that we will be able to sell it for a good profit in a year or two.

front

The front of the house looks much more “alive” now.

Number 2

We are moving right along with Meadow Arbor 2, despite a lack of photos and the fact that Frank the project manager had a construction accident and had to have the tip of a finger re-attached. Yow! The team Frank found to do the renovation are fast workers, which we always appreciate. Too bad they will probably go back to commercial work after this job.

The exterior has been painted in the blues that Carol picked, and of course all bad wood has been replaced. It certainly looks 100% more interesting than it did before, especially the snazzy garage door! And the interiors are no longer many bright colors, which is a relief to the eye. We’ll have more interior pictures soon.

The garage is an aquamarine color.

We were just about to start pre-marketing that house as a rental, when our real estate person in San Antonio, Alba, got wind of a family who is interested in buying the house as an owner finance. Hmm! We’ll see how that works out! Good work on both the rental and the potential buyer, Alba!

(The picture originals are sort of small, but you can get the idea, at least. Thanks to Frank and his subcontractor for taking the time to get us some photos!)

kitchen

Here’s the kitchen all floated and ready for paint.

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The Walls Came Tumbling Down

What’s left of some of the chain link fence. They were very careful to not destroy plants, even the weed trees.

We hope you had a safe Independence Day weekend, if you are in the US! We had some booming action ourselves.

Over at the Hermits’ Rest Enterprises offices in Cameron, we are making room for potential new construction.  We have three houses in a row on Travis St., but there are actually six lots. Three have houses, while one has the warehouse/storage building on it. We hope to add some new buildings (houses? tiny houses? duplexes? storefronts?) in the spaces between our office and the Travis 2 house and the space between Travis 2 and the new Andress RV park.

However, to do that, some things had to go, and those were an ancient garage, storage building, and greenhouse. We also needed to remove all the fencing around all but one house, so that we can re-do them to fit into the lots properly. The wooden fence around the office house was barely worthy of the name “fence,” since it had so many missing posts it was more of a suggestion of a fence. other fences were chain link, and in weird shapes. So, as you can see in the pictures, they went away!

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