The Military Factor

The housing market continued to scorch. It was rare for a house to sit for sale for very long. One day I noticed that there was one in our neighborhood that seemed to be taking a while. I decided to check it out.

As there are a lot of military in our area, they have to move every few years and can get under a time crunch to sell their houses. This was one such case. For reasons I never figured out, no one had made them an offer. So I did. It certainly wasn’t top price but if time was ticking, I could get them out from under it and with the way prices had risen they would certainly still make a profit. They accepted.

I didn’t use a buyer’s agent. I just had my lawyer write up the contract and the seller’s agent did the rest. My partner on the other house also went in 50/50 with me again. With the price being so high, we wouldn’t have made any profit by flipping it so it would be another rental. We wanted to hold on to it anyway to make money from the rising prices.

After some basic sprucing up I put out the “for rent” sign and got a funny call. It went like this,

“Hello, I’m calling about the house for rent in Greenwood.”

“Oh hey, yeah, what kind of details do you want to know.”

“Wait, is this Stephen Williams?”

“Yes…”

“This is Bruce Carter…How many places do you own?”

Bruce Carter was the guy who was renting my town home and this could have very quickly turned into a very awkward conversation, realizing he was looking around for something else to rent when he was in the middle of a contract on my other place. But because we had a larger mortgage on the new house and wanted to get that covered as quickly as possible, I had no problem moving them over. I also knew I could easily re-rent the town home. I assured him that I didn’t have vast real estate holdings and we agreed to the swap.

A short while later, I saw another house in our neighborhood that sat for a minute. I inquired and it was the same situation with a military family. I went for it again. This time I just went into it by myself to flip it as quickly as possible. I got it for a price that I thought I could make some money - not huge margins but some money, nevertheless.

I cleaned the place up (particularly focusing on the pet smell permeating the place) and advertised to sell. I got several inquiries, one of which was from somebody who knew about structures. He and his father inspected everything and found a leak in the crawl space. With the market the way it was, I was selling as is. I didn’t feel like I needed to do any repairs. They just wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into. I already had other people lined up to view the house if they bowed out. They decided they were willing to buy it as it was.

The whole transaction, from my closing to theirs, took about two months and after all the expenses, I cleared about $5000. It didn’t seem like a whole lot compared to what I heard other real estate investors were making but it got my feet wet and at least I had not lost anything. I was happy with that.


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