Selling our rental property
We’re coming up on the one-year countdown before our big move to the UK. It’s starting to feel REALLY real. A year goes fast - one more of every season, every month, every holiday, and then poof! It’s done. Gulp.
We kick-started the countdown by getting our investment property ready to sell. I had a plan for how it would go, and some of it went as planned, some didn’t.
First of all, here’s what I learned about being a landlord:
Go check on your property. Seriously, it’s your property. At the end of the day, you’re on the hook for anything that goes wrong. We didn’t want to bother our tenants so never entered the property during the four years they lived there. We should have done a walk-through every year to see what repairs and upkeep we would’ve liked to address, rather than finding out about stuff after they moved out.
Don’t allow animals. Or at least, require an extra deposit or charge extra rent. Maybe I’m just speaking from the nightmare zone, but it doesn’t matter how clean someone is, that animal fur (and smell!) gets everywhere - the carpet, the curtains, the vents, the walls. Everywhere.
Create a thorough lease and honor it. We missed assigning lawn care on the lease, so we ended up taking care of it for the first two years before speaking with the tenants and having them take over. And we said we would supply salt for the water softener, but after a year or so of checking in and seeing if they needed any (and they always said no), we took the hint and left them alone, assuming they preferred to handle it themselves. Wrong! They just never refilled it and we needed to get a plumber to fix the clogged faucets.
It’s worth it if you’re into it. We haven’t finished the sale yet so can’t say what the final numbers are, but in the four years we owned the house as a rental, the property value has increased dramatically. And, although the house was gross when the tenants moved out and we spent two weeks deep cleaning, overall it’s been pretty low stress. The tenants always paid rent on time and we rarely heard from them. (I guess because they were too busy rubbing cat fur into the curtains.)
So why are we selling?
We need money for the UK Spouse Visa.
We want to divest in preparation for our move, aka simplify our life and assets.
We have other stuff going on. It’s been a good investment, but we are ready to have one less thing to think about.
What’s it like to sell a house right now?
It’s definitely a seller’s market, at least here in cute University towns in the Midwest.
There is next to nothing for sale right now, especially in the desirable neighborhood where our rental house is located.
We still made an effort - we painted everything, hired staging and made a few updates (new dishwasher, etc.).
The effort has been worth it. We’ve had huge interest and our Realtor expects multiple offers. Fingers crossed!
What have I learned?
I can’t help but look ahead to when we sell our family home next year. It’ll be a different story since we’ll still be living in the house while we try to sell it - compared to selling a vacant rental property.
We won’t do staging. The stagers were great, but it’s not cheap and they need the house to be vacant (not gonna happen). It was important for our rental house because it’s small, under 1,000 sq ft, so we really wanted to show how furniture fits in the home.
There’s more to do than you expect. I’m going to try to pace myself during this one-year countdown with any painting or other updates we should do before we sell. When we do the walk-through with our Realtor, I don’t want to be making a list of all the stuff we need to fix before we list.
I’ll have to figure out what to do with our stuff. I’m not sure what the timing will be of downsizing and shipping belongings, but I’m guessing we’ll want to ditch a bunch of things before we list so the house doesn’t look cluttered. If you walked through our house right now you’d assume crazy people live here.
And I’ll have to figure out what to do with us. We’re expecting to accept an offer just a few days after listing our rental property. If the market is as hot next year, maybe we can just go away for a long weekend while people tour our house.
