Friday, September 19, 2008

I must be buying a house...

Because my basement kids gave notice! Great! Oh, and the third floor apartment at the new place is now vacant - no real surprise there. A lot of people move out when houses change hands. It's also not a bad thing, since she was paying SUPER LOW rent. It'll be vacant for a month but at least I can get someone in at market rent. But it's going to be a very busy fall for me - I have to get three apartments rented as fast as humanly possible or it's going to be a lean Christmas at the Ostrowercha house. ;) At least the attic and the basement at Lottridge will be quick and easy to rent. It's the biggy, the 3-bedroom that needs hours of painting and fixing that will be fun to get rented in December. Blah. Here we go with full-time landlord job again.

Ah well. It pays well, I suppose.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Cleared Conditions

I forgot to update. We've cleared conditions on the Sanford house! Our mortgage broker is amazing. The lowest rate out there right now is 5.39% fixed for five years. She got us 5.32%!! We were thinking about going variable, but the best out there for that is prime less 0.3%. Right now prime is 4.75% and it hasn't been moving in either direction for awhile. For the little bit of gain, the risk isn't worth getting a variable rate that is less than 1 point lower than our fixed rate.

So, we let the sellers know that we have cleared all our conditions and we'll be buying this pile of bricks on October 29. Now for all the fun stuff - I've called the insurance agent, he's coming out next week to take photos and give us a quote. No rush there. I've got all the utilities switched for Oct 29 - the only one I'm sorta worried about is the water heater rental - they've shipped their call center overseas, I can tell by the accents. And the fact that they really have no idea what I'm talking about. All I have to do now is get a PO Box and we're all set.

Phew! Oh - and I've got 4 roofers coming out to give us a quote on this beast. Our principal residence is leaking and groaning about roof replacement. Bah. It's going to be HUGE! One of the companies is DeLuca roofing, who does all the roofs for the homebuilder Rob works for (167 last year), so he says they'll give us a really good price. We'll see.