The House in Question

Well, we met with our real estate agent and the news wasn’t very good. She thought we could sell it for about $10,000 to 20,000 less than we paid for it. If we finished the basement she thought we could sell it for about what we bought it for. We estimate it needs about $5,000 to finish the basement. (The basement already has a finished bathroom and bedroom and is fully framed and wired.)

So…I think we are going to rent it out again for at least a year in which time we can slowly finish the basement and keep contributing equity to the outstanding mortgage. By this time next year we will have another $6,000 paid toward the house that doesn’t come from our pockets (hopefully that means equity). So even if we spend the $5000 to finish it we’ll come out ahead and we’d be able to either charge more in rent or sell it for more.

It’s not ideal, but for the timing of this (being right before we buy the place in Puerto Rico), I think it will have to be. We don’t want to have to shell out such a large sum in PR and have an empty rental that we are paying for and waiting to sell for a low amount on top of paying back the short term personal loans we got to buy the Rincon property.

We are ok with this. If our current tenant had wanted to stay we wouldn’t even be having this conversation and we’d let sleeping dogs lie. We thought if it played out right that this would be a good time to walk away and sell, but it just isn’t quite yet. So, that’s the plan, for now anyway. We hope to start showing it to prospective tenants this upcoming week and get them signed on the same week our current tenant moves out.