Hey guys I just brought my first property and I literally will have to rehab it as my paychecks come weekly. So I don’t have much money to fix up the property. It already has existing kitchen cabinets and all of the bathroom fixtures it’s just dirty. Do you think it would be ok to clean it and keep the tub and stuff or do I need to get rid of everything? It’s going to be a rental property by the way in sort of a “rough” neighborhood.
Do NOT rehab this house, if you’re just going to rent it.
Make it clean and functional …and rent it.
Every week that goes by is lost rent. You’ll never get it back. Ever.
When you decide to sell, then do your upgrades and remodeling, but not before.
I know that you really, really want to put on your interior decorator and remodeler’s hat, but now’s not the time. Timing is everything. And you are about to do it all bass ackwards.
Clean it and rent it.
A “Rough Neighborhood” Oh Crap. My one and only Rehab was in a rough neighborhood. My partner and I picked up a duplex for 23K previous owner had removed the tar roof, Repeat after me… Never buy a property with a flat roof.
Anyways it had rained and the sheet rock was ruined, the druggies had removed all the doors and broken all the windows. My partner and I didn’t have any cash and we got the property with no money down from a bank, it was a foreclosure. But we had credit cards. While rehabbing we wud get messages from the local druggies, hypo needles stuck in the front door, anything we laid down was soon missing, even if it was a cheap pair of gardening gloves. They wud even unscrew the sprinkler heads. I had to start staying there, one evening I left to go get a burrito and came back to find a big black lowlife drug addict hiding in the units. He said it was shitty cuz we fired him. Just because he was a lazy useless thieven drug addict? How rude of us.
My partner and I removed all the old carpets, sheetrock etc and spent 3 months rehabbing this place. Now it was worth 80K and we had 45K into it.
Soon had it rented but the new roof didn’t hold out long on this flat roof, soon tenants were complaining and stopped paying rents, after multiple tries of patching and having the washer and dryer stolen. I just signed the darn thing over to my partner. I never made a dime.
However the lowlife that was breaking in & stealing from us had a nice low rider car.
I had a nice pellet gun and a bad ass whamo sling shot.
Before I left I shot out all his windows and put some big dents in his vehicle with some well aimed high velocity rocks.
Now, I get a lot of these junk houses in bad neighborhoods, would I rehab them, haha, You think I’m insane?
I flip them fast to the rehabbers that have the gonads for this type of thing.
Rando
Thanks guys! I think a good cleaning will do it but my fiancé/partner says we’d be slumlord landlords if we don’t gut it out. I’m not sure what to do
Yeah, well “fiancés” are a dime-a-dozen, and so are partners. Find ones that have better business sense, and/or ones that aren’t embarrassed to make money, and/or don’t confuse investment quality properties with the place they live in.
Just saying.
Here’s what I would do. If everything is there, just paint everything white except the carpet and it will look clean and rentable. Kitchen cabinets and handles = white melamine. Countertops = white melamine. Walls = semi-gloss white latex. Pink bathroom tile = scuff then paint with white melamine. Bathtub = white melamine. Light blue sink = white melamine. I’ll even paint wallpaper semi-gloss white. Light fixtures = white Tremclad. You can even paint the plugs white. White paint is a lot cheaper than gutting anything and it’s clean and the end result is it doesn’t look like a slum anymore. The only thing you should be changing is the carpet and if you do, get the black commercial carpet (it hides the stains really well).