First and foremost, I should mention that if anyone has been looking for my previous posts concerning this property, you are not crazy. A couple of weeks ago, I removed them from the Real Estate category after something improbable happened. Long story short, according to my tracking logs, someone within range of the house ended up finding this blog via a Google search for "utilities for 5 bedroom house in Tobyhanna"... or something to that effect. For obvious reasons, my mind went in a thousand different directions trying to figure out if this was one of our potential buyers that now, instead of writing a contract, were perusing photos of how miserable the house looked before we started the renovations. And of course no one wants to see the before pictures of the house they're going to buy. So without any mention or hesitation, down came the entries and corresponding photos... but they're not gone forever. We'll repost all of them as soon as we turn the corner on this transaction.
Anyway, I look back now at one of my initial blog entries concerning the sale of this property, and can only shake my head at how wrong I was. With confidence (and first-time-flip optimism) I declared that the first family that looking at the house would buy it. So much for my career as a tarot card reader.
That's not a smile, it's a look of disgust.Cleaning the nastiest indoor bathroom I've ever
seen has to be worth at least 10 grand.
But the ironic part is, in the midst of my false declaration, V and I still managed to somehow budget pretty accurately as to what it would cost to carry the house until it was sold. Our estimate going in was $6000 in expenses (including everything from mortgage payments to property-related telephone calls) . Granted, all of the financial details are not in just yet, but in estimating the only (?) 4 expenses we have left (electric and water for August, final payment for homeowners insurance, and the interest accrued on our line of credit) I'm coming up with $6612... which makes $6000 a pretty doggone good estimate for a couple of flip rookies. As for the selling price and all of the other financials, I'll hold off on that until it's totally a done deal. So sit tight nosey people :o) You'll be all up in our business in no time. For now, I will at least say that we had to bend a little bit more than I wanted to in terms of the selling price and seller's assist amount. But then (a) every seller probably says that, and (b) that's pretty consistent with what I wrote about in the previous entry as far as the market being brutal right now on the seller's end. I remember my inside connection to the real estate world (i.e., mom) mentioning something like there being only about 900 houses on the market this time last year in our selling area... compared to over 3000 this year. That's a lot of inventory... which is causing housing prices to drop like hot potatoes; sellers to lose their collective minds; and buyers to walk away with fantastic deals, excited and euphoric, feeling like they stole something.
And so with that, I don't have to tell you that our first order of business will be to quite possible jump right back into the game... hoping to cash in some chips on the buyers end of this bear market, and maybe come away with another SC rental property for dirt cheap (relatively speaking anyway).
But like everything else, only time will tell. For now, we're content to just bask in the glory of having a contract.
Finally.
Now we just have to pray that the inspection report turns up zilch.
Vacuuming almost 3000 square feet of new carpet took a whole lot longer than my dad and I anticipated. I think we used at least a dozen vacuum bags, including the ones we emptied and reused over and over again (how ghetto!)
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