Sunday, April 8, 2007

I am the awesomest!

For the past week and a half all I have been hearing is "We HAVE to get that apartment rented. Have to have to have to..." from the budget King. Mind you - he *IS* in charge of the finances and how much we owe and don't have. Ha! This was actually a pretty rotten month to close on a house, considering. We had to front end a year's worth of house insurance on the new property ($1200), April 30 is the quarterly property tax due date ($481 on new house, $760 on our duplex), and the every-tw-months hydro bills are due on the 17th (about $550 for the duplex, probably around $450 for the triplex). Yikes! And only two of four units occupied!

BUT. The problem with renting is that the cardinal rule is to list in the paper around the 15th of the month or you're wasting your ad fee. NOBODY responds to ads at any other time of the month, oddly. Since we closed on March 16, I figured on listing April 15, and May 1 would be a lost cause, have move-in to the first floor 1-bedroom on June 1. But at least I'd get a last month's deposit. I put it on the free websites and have shown it a few times, but mostly to lookie-loos..had a couple of people interested, but it didn't pan out.

Today, however, I rented the damn thing! SOLD! To the sister-in-law of my upstairs tenant. She loved the place. And she wants to move in May 1st. Amazing! I gave her a bit of a discount on the price but it was just to the low end of our threshold. I listed at $700 and figured on $650, which is what I got.

So excited. Well, relieved actually. And I came through on my part, as Rob said, with flying colours. We're a good team. He gets the bills paid and I get the cash flow. Damn!

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Update

I'm a terrible updater, eh? Ha. Too busy.

What's up in my life lately? The upstairs tenant moved in to the new house, loves it (of course). Her kids are great, she's super polite, and I hope they stay for a long, long time. It looks like they will, though. They think this is the nicest apartment they have ever seen! Her sister and brother-in-law were actually asking if we had anything else like it. :)

Downstairs is not flying off the shelf, but I haven't done any serious tenant-looking yet. It goes in the paper next weeek-ish so that should be okay. Really, we should get those last few things finished rather than saying to prospectives "This will be done before you move in...". Unfortunately, I need their deposit to do the work! :) My brother and his girlfriend are looking for a place right now, and they're sorta interested. Which would make things easy/difficult. I think it's more than they should be paying, but they really like it. I'm trying to steer him towards something almost as nice, but cheaper. I don't want to bankrupt my baby brother!

Besides the landlording, I'm finally relaxing a teensy bit. Work is insane, and I am SO looking forward to the long weekend. SO MUCH. You have no idea.