Ding Dong the Duplex Deal is Dead

I’m some­what sad­dened to report my offer for the duplex has been cancelled. 

Thanks to the zon­ing issue, my dreams of own­ing a mul­ti-fam­i­ly rental prop­er­ty have been delayed by quite a bit. The sell­er exhaust­ed all of her avail­able avenues and was­n’t will­ing to fight the board to get the prop­er­ty zoned to mul­ti-fam­i­ly. Nor was she will­ing to drop the price and let me deal with the issue, although I’m not sure I would have tak­en that offer. I want my first pur­chase to be as easy as is human­ly pos­si­ble, and fight­ing the zon­ing board for 3+ months does not sound any­where near easy.

What she wants to do is put it on the mar­ket for full price, and either let some­one else deal with the zon­ing issue, or try to find a buy­er who will use it as a sin­gle fam­i­ly like she did.

I’m kind of sad I’m not going to buy this prop­er­ty. It’s a beau­ti­ful house on a big lot close to the shop­ping cen­ter of town. Not to men­tion, I would have had a LOT of mon­ey com­ing in every month which would have sig­nif­i­cant­ly bumped up my sav­ings rate.

On the oth­er hand, I’m also kind of glad I did­n’t get this prop­er­ty. Since it had­n’t had a valid rental cer­tifi­cate since 1993, there would’ve been a fair amount of improve­ments I need­ed to make before I could get renters. Things like adding more smoke detec­tors, GCFI out­lets in the bath­rooms, and what­ev­er oth­er haz­ards the inspec­tor found.

In addi­tion to the city man­dat­ed changes, I also had a grow­ing list of things I want­ed to change or add, to include but not lim­it­ed to:
‑Add wall ovens to both sides (and relat­ed elec­tri­cal and car­pen­try work)
‑Mod­i­fy back­splash in one kitchen
‑Buy a refrig­er­a­tor for one kitchen
‑Fix gut­ter on shed
‑Tear off exist­ing wallpaper
‑Fin­ish ceil­ing tex­ture on one side
‑Replace out­let cov­ers and light fix­tures as needed
‑poten­tial mit­i­ga­tion from effects of her 4 dachshunds
‑pon­tental car­pet replacement

As you can see, there was a fair­ly exten­sive list of things that need­ed to be done. Noth­ing incred­i­bly major, but all of those small things added up. And, on the bright side, I no longer need to scour Craigslist and oth­er local sites for wall ovens and a fridge.

What next?

For now, I will con­tin­ue sav­ing up for a down pay­ment and keep look­ing for a mul­ti-fam­i­ly invest­ment prop­er­ty. I’ve been keep­ing an eye on the mar­ket, but there has been ZERO new prop­er­ties in the zip­codes I like the last month. One rea­son I was­n’t con­cerned about the oth­er deal tak­ing a long time. If there had been a prop­er­ty I liked, I would’ve end­ed the deal and gone after that one.

I knew going into this that real estate invest­ing isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the eas­i­est thing on the plan­et to do. If it were easy, every­one would do it instead of let­ting our mon­ey sit in index funds. I’m not dis­cour­aged in the slight­est since I accept­ed at the very begin­ning of this process that shit hap­pens and there isn’t shit I can do about it. This deal fell through for rea­sons beyond our con­trol, so it was­n’t like the sell­er was reject­ing me per­son­al­ly. In fact, the sell­er actu­al­ly liked me a lot and was hap­py I was buy­ing the duplex instead of some sleazy slum­lord. Hope­ful­ly, I will make as good of an impres­sion on the next sell­er and be able to close the deal with no issues!