Just before John and I were engaged to be married, John ventured into the real estate world. He bought a four plex and at first, everything went pretty well. We were even able to rent out our house and live in a one bedroom unit for a few month after our marriage. But then, we realized we both owned too much junk and we missed the green house. We put our complex up for sell and we ran into a few gliches. We had problems with offers going through and then we had a big blow when a city inspector came out and told us that our complex was not even recognized by the city as a fourplex and we would be subject to fines because of a dispute that had never been settled with previous owners. We went to community meetings where originally a waiver was voted upon for us but then later retracted. We paid money to the city thinking it was easily resolveable and even had a hearing where many city people came to inspect the complex. Needless to say, these problems did not make the complex sell any easier. In fact, we had four offers fall through because of city problems. It always seemed like we had to be fixing this or that at the complex and with trying to sell, we didn't want to kick our tenants when they failed to pay on time. It would be harder to sell if the units were empty. Our complex quickly became our money pit!
So John and I held our breath until 4pm today when a offer was made and would close. As of right now, 5:30pm mst, we no longer own the complex and everything is out of our name.
Of course though, one final thing would need to go wrong, because we couldn't escape that easily! This past Saturday, one of the drains in one of our units started backing up what may have been raw sewage from the toilets. Of course our insurance on household repairs did not have any services for immediate emergency dispatchment on the weekends, so John and I were forced to go outside of our plan to hire a drain and sewage specialist to fix our mess. Needless to say, John and I were not ready to celebrate prematurely! But finally we can breath and the problem is our no longer!
Can you tell how excited we are?! Having real estate was a great experience though. It taught us that we never want to do it again! With today's market slump and raising apartment rates, the only way to make money in that business is to own multiple properties and to not be as soft as we tended to be toward our tenants! At anyrate, it was a huge burden we were praying would be lifted from our shoulders and finally it has!
