And oh yeah, how the house sale is doing...

I guess since this is a disgruntled investor site, and since you've already enjoyed the fine comedy stylings of Mr. Jim Gaffigan (if you haven't scroll down), I should go ahead and update my readers (reader) on how my "sure thing" house investment is doing.

The house has now been up for sale for 15 days, and has had one open house, and beyond that a lot of foot traffic. General consensus from the people who have come by to see the place - great place, but there's this other place in the same neighborhood that's significantly cheaper...

The main problem I'm dealing with (and in fact dealt with during my last unsuccessful sales attempt) is that the people who have their homes up for sale now have owned said homes for several years. This means that if they sell their house for, say, $430,000, it may be below "market," but since they paid half that for it originally, they're still making a killing on it. Since I've only had my place for a year, I'm at a marked disadvantage in this respect, since unfortunately I can only do so much to my place to make someone want to pay $40K more for it.

So, I'm left with this dilemma - lower the price and take a loss right off the bat, or take it off the market, re-rent it, and hope the market picks up sharply rather quickly, since I'd be losing several hundred dollars a month due to my inability to get a high enough rent on each room to cover the mortgage. Yeah, it was a bad investment, I know.

The first option, although it sucks, is arguably the better of the two, since not only would I be rid of the damn spot, but also the market could very well have peaked for several years, and meanwhile I can't keep bleeding money every month.

As such, I've lowered the price to a "more reasonable" $458,000. Will I get that? Who knows, but maybe at least it'll get these agents and their clients to start offering up contracts of some kind. I'm doing another open house this weekend, and a buddy of mine is pimping the place out to an investor friend of his, which, obviously would be the best possible outcome. So, we'll see, and I'll keep updating as it goes along.

The tenant I have in there has surprisingly kept the place up quite well, I have to say. So, there's one positive.

The lesson learned in all of this: I bought the first place at a reasonable price - perhaps a tad higher than I should have gone, but low enough to be able to break even when rented out. The three guys I have in there right now are stellar, and have no immediate plans to move out soon. In buying a place as a rental property, this is about as good as I could have done in the area. The second place was a complete mistake, because I should have figured out that I couldn't have gotten sufficient rent on it to cover the mortgage. But, mostly, the biggest lesson I've learned is that before delving into real estate purchases such as these, I should have decided whether I wanted a fix and flip property or a rental property. I bought both of these places as fix and flip properties, then treated them as rental properties. Therein lies the problem.

On a completely unrelated note, as I'm typing this, I'm listening to Miles Davis's - "Aura" album, which represented his New Agey 1980's collaboration with a Danish composer and "big band" setup. Gotta say, I may be the biggest Miles fan around, but this is damn near unlistenable. His playing is superb as always, but it's unfortunately overshadowed by laughable drum machine "beats," synthesized bass playing that sounds like the beginning to a bad porn (are there really any bad porns??), and further synthesized synthesizers and guitars that sound like a nightmare. Evidently, this musical suite was written by this Danish composer as a tribute to Miles Davis, similar to how The Allman Brothers' "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" was intended as an homage to Miles. The album won a Grammy apparently, but, of course, that doesn't really mean anything. Again, I love the guy, but he sure got weird as shit in the early 80's. His late 80's hip-hop album, Doo-Bop, kicks ass, though.