Brodie got a very nice promotion back in February. That's a good thing, right? Unfortunately, this necessitates a move to the vicinity of our nation's capitol, leaving our beautiful, oh-so-comfortable rambling brick ranch in southern VA. Ack! And in the current real estate market, we can't just wait for our house to sell here before we start looking there. So, like a lot of people, we decided to take advantage of someone else's misfortune and buy a foreclosure house.
After the fact, we discovered that we hadn't been as predatory as we'd imagined. While it was indeed a foreclosure, it had been a rental at the time. And the owner was not a good landlord, taking care of the property to ensure its value. She was apparently just getting as much rent out of the property as she could without properly maintaining it. In other words, it was in deplorable shape, but that was not the fault of the previous occupant. From what we've seen, the landlord should have been paying the tenant to live there.
We further discovered that the previous occupant was a single, middle-aged woman. Why 1 person would need a 3 bedroom house with a living room, family room, office and a large "recreation room" (formerly the 1-car garage), is beyond me entirely, but the neighbors tell us it was just her living there. I remember learning, somewhere along the way, that when it comes to real estate, what you really want is the worst house in a good neighborhood. You get the most potential for the least money and you have nowhere to go but up. There's practically no way to loose money on the deal, the worst that can happen is you break even, and if you're willing to do a lot of work yourself instead of hiring it out, your sweat equity can turn into big profits. This is NOT the approach Brodie and I have used when buying RE up until now, we were more interested in move-in condition. Heaven only knows why we did this time. But we really have our work cut out for us.
