A Look Back On Our Rental Experience
Our renters have officially moved in. 🥳🥳🥳
Now we get to go through the actual being a landlord part of this process. Overall, I gotta say that buying the home and then getting it rented was…an ordeal. That was mostly because we had to wait for the townhome to be built, but still. We went under contract in January, closed in September, got it rented in October, and they moved in this month, November. A lot of shit has changed in life and the world since we started this venture.
Given the information that we had at the time, I don’t think I would have done anything differently (aside from potentially using a different lender). I definitely know what I would want to change if we bought again, whether that be another home or a rental. I would still want new construction, but I am not wanting to wait for it to be built as we did with this one. This took eight months and that was way too long. Preferably something closer to being completed already.
Getting it rented went surprisingly quickly, only 13 days, given that Hurricane Ian came right after we listed it on Zillow. Turns out that if you don’t require the crazy nonsense that other landlords do, it goes pretty quickly. What’s my definition of “crazy nonsense”? Well to rent a townhome around here, you just need two to three months’ security deposit + first & last month’s rent + 3x the rent in income + 750+ credit score + renter pays all utilities, trash, cable & internet, does the lawn, and does pest control. All for the low, low price of $2200- $2800 a month on average! The lower the rent, the more stuff they required as well. 🙄 Quite a range, huh? And they actually get rented pretty quickly. Mostly by people who are from out of state.
We did require a security deposit, but it was one month. The rental price of $2400 included water, trash, internet, lawn, and basic pest control. So far everything’s going well and we’ll see how it all pans out. 😊
How has your experience been as a renter or as a landlord?
Feature Photo by River Fx on Unsplash
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