There are quite a few brand new shiny condo developments in my neighborhood. All over town, actually. They’ve gone up in good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. They’ve gone up in residential neighborhoods and downtown areas. I’ve seen flyers for condos that cost easily three or four times as much as a an average single family house a block away. Condos condos condos.
The whole time I was watching them go up, and seeing that the prices were (on average) considerably more than a single family home in the same neighborhood, I couldn’t help but wonder who was actually going to live in them…
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Since the duplex next door went up for sale, I’ve been running a lot of ideas through my head. Could I buy it? Should I buy it?
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When I first bought my duplex, I didn’t really have a set of rules and regulations. I was too new at this game to have one, and I also had this misguided idea that I would be “cool landlord” who was informal, and let people “make the place their own.” That has only worked to varying degrees. People will unfortunately always have at least a little bit of animosity for the landlord; they’ll always think that you’re a big rich moneybag who’s too cheap to buy them new (fill in the blank). The landlord just says “no” and cashes their rent check every month.
Ah, but there is a reason for that “no.” Many reasons. Here’s a list of things that I’ve learned to say “no” to…
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My tenants are making themselves at home in the backyard. I’ve given them a fairly free reign over planting things in the yard (as long as there isn’t already something else growing there, and it won’t be a pain to mow around), and they’ve taken me up on it. They’ve planted some hostas around trees, and created a small flowerbed by the fenceline, with flowering annuals, and a clematis that should return year after year.
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Turns out there’s more to the story about the duplex next door — A few days after I saw the older gentlemen curiously trimming the tree branches of their daughter’s purportedly “trashed” duplex, I came home from work to see the the front yard meticulously mowed, and sporting a new addition — a for sale sign.
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The neighbors in the duplex next door seem to have disappeared. In an all-at-once, in the middle-of-the-night sort of way. Actually, the kind of way where THEY are gone, but the inordinately large amount of junk that they had in the yard was left behind. I suspect that they treated the inside of the duplex in much the same way.
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My Uncle, a real estate agent, recently inherited some money, and decided to use it to purchase my duplex’s big sister, “the fourplex.” Not sure exactly if they purchased it out-right, most likely they just used it for a 20% or larger down payment.
How is buying a fourplex, or four-flat different than buying a duplex?
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I showed a loss of several thousand dollars on my schedule E this year, from expenses related to my duplex - many of which would be nondeductible expenses that I would have as a homeowner…
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My duplex has a large yard, and thus attracts tenants who are fans of the great outdoors. I have a lot of space for flower gardens, hanging pots, and a large vegetable garden. I’ve planted a lot of perennials around the house, and in the front yard, but reserved ample space for my tenants to get their hands dirty. Why? While this may result in a lot of untended plants (which it has, in years past), allowing tenants to garden helps to foster a sense of “attachment” to the property. They feel like they’re a part of the place, rather than just staying there for a while and writing a check to me every month.
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Filling out the actual paper forms to do your taxes (yes, I do it the old-fashioned way, on actual paper), isn’t hard. What is hard, is keeping track of your expenses throughout the year, so that you know what to put on those forms.
Throughout the year, I keep track of the following for my duplex expenses…
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Tax benefits are one of the biggest reasons that buying a duplex is a good idea. Yes, the tax benefits of owning a duplex are pretty nice, especially that whole depreciation thing. However, the catch here is that your taxes get a LOT harder to do, once you own a duplex. I went from being an apartment dweller who filed a simple 1040EZ to having a bunch of (fairly) detailed schedules to fill out every year. And while the schedules themselves aren’t actually that hard, once you figure out what you’re doing (or find someone to pay to figure them out for you), the biggest part is something that only you can do: Keeping track of your expenses. Well. In an organized fashion. Preferably throughout the year.
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…Said the very wise plumber who visited my house last week. He said that the washer water coming up the sink drains was wholly unrelated to the catastrophic dripping (gushing) out of the bathtub hot water faucet, but that these things usually tend to go in threes. “Three? Hmm, this has only been two…” I replied, and then he quickly revised his opinion to “bad things happen in twos.”
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Ever since the plumbing catastrophe that happened last week, my bathtub hot water faucet has mysteriously developed a drip. Could be coincidence, but I think that it has something to do with the pressure of things being clogged, plunged, etc. I’ve been choosing to ignore the drip, as the fixtures on the bathtub are fairly old and difficult to work with.
Apparently the bathtub faucet wasn’t content with that, because this morning, the situation changed such that I COULDN’T ignore it — the faucet WOULDN’T SHUT OFF! (at all! hot water gushing full-stream out of the faucet, even when it was turned all the way off!)
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So, to recap the last post, I was minding my own business last night, when all of a sudden, I’ve got sudsy washer water coming up through both my kitchen and bathroom drains. It overflowed in the bathroom, and then refused to go down in either sink. I plunged away at them, but only managed to change the sudsy, clean-ish water into black gook. I panicked, I worried, I envisioned people having to install a whole new plumbing system in my house, and/or dig up my front yard… I called my only male friend in the neighborhood like 40 times (no answer, of course). I called the drain guy I’ve hired in the past, bracing myself for the worst…
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So, it’s Sunday night and I’m minding my own business, doing some laundry, potting a couple of plants, tidying up the house, getting ready for the week. When all of a sudden….
Water — sudsy water — from the washing machine starts coming up in my bathroom AND kitchen sinks! my bathroom sink actually overflowed before the water started going back down!
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So, my mother gives me a Christmas wreath every year at Thanksgiving when I visit her, and I hang it on the front of the duplex, adding a little holiday cheerfulness to the front of the house. (Outdoor Christmas lights are definitely waaaaay too much work for me to get into.) This year, however, she has upped the quality of the wreath, which caused a bit of a dilemma…
The wreath, when hung on the front door, wouldn’t allow the storm door to close! It was too nice, and big, and full of holiday cheer (unlike the relatively flat, scrooge-like wreaths of years past, which nestled in between the doors just fine.)
I found a novel product that allowed me to hang the wreath directly on the glass of the storm door, using a magnet on either side of the door.
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I just received an email today from Landlord2Landlord, my screening agency, saying that TransUnion had changed its requirements, which creates big problems for me. Previously, of the three main credit reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax), only one allowed small landlords to pull credit reports on potential tenants without having an “on-site inspection” of their property management office — to ensure that credit reports were dealt with in a professional and confidential manner, kept locked up securely, etc. In the case of a small landlord whose “office” was in his or her residence, Experian and Equifax required an inspection to ensure that the “property management office” was separate from the living area of the residence, and that it was “secure”. This all sounds fine and good, but I have exactly ONE rental unit. They want me to have a totally separate, locked room to store credit reports for my ONE rental unit, or else I just can’t pull them at all?
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I had a much easier time renting out my duplex apartment last April than I have the previous few times… I had chalked it up to better advertising, cosmetic improvements, and luck. According to an article at hotpads.com, however, perhaps there was something bigger at work — rental vacancy rates (and rents) are turning around, coming out of the five year slump they’ve been in.
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My tenants recently let me know that the water pressure in their shower was really low — lower than when they moved into their apartment. I live in the other unit of the duplex, and we both use the same water system, and I hadn’t noticed any difference… This would take some investigating.
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Selecting tenants is really one of my most important decisions as a duplex owner. If I screen poorly and select the wrong tenants, I could find myself with property damage, police calls, noise complaints, and even worse - an eviction case. If I select the right tenants, everything should go smoothly and I’ll hardly know they’re there. So I have to be choosy, but there are a lot of restrictions on the ways in which I can do so — I have to be sure not to inadvertently violate federal Fair Housing Laws.
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