Back-story: several years ago, my hubby and I bought a couple of investment properties in rural WV. One is a 10-unit apartment building in a teeny, tiny town called West Union. I mean tiny. The town police force consists on one chief and three full-time officers. (I am not exaggerating). The other property is a six-unit trailer park in a more rural location (read: middle of freakin’ nowhere).
If these properties are properly managed and we can manage to convert the apartment building to Section 8 (public housing) certified, the profit margin is excellent. Problem is, when we first bought the properties, one of the guys (young guy, young wife, two kids) signed on as building manager. He was great! Hard-working, on top of things, always thinking of better ways to do things, etc. Well, he was great until he crawled back into the bottle (we didn’t know when we appointed him that he had a history of getting into trouble by getting hammered). After he had an affair with another tenant, his wife left him. He got thrown in jail because he was already on probation, and one of the conditions of his probation was no drinking. So we found another manager. Hmph. IF other tenants bring said manager a money order to pay their rent, he will mail it to us. Otherwise, he has done exactly nothing. We’ve put ads in local newspapers (local to West Union), ads on Craigslist, etc. looking for a semi-competent building manager. Nada.
So we made the decision to move out there ourselves. For the first year, we are going to live in the “Owner’s Apartment”. When the building was converted to an apartment house, one of the ground-floor apartments was designed to be for the owners to live in. It has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, central air, jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, separate entrance and covered patio. It’s pretty nice. Everyone who looks at the place wants that apartment, but we’ve yet to put anyone in there who can afford the rent (it’s $100.00 more per month than our next most-expensive unit).
This is a poor area. Almost everyone there is on unemployment, disability, public assistance, or work at barely-minimum-wage jobs. When we collect rent, it’s always, always, always cash or money orders, because none of them have checking accounts. I suspect that when we move in, we’ll be the only tenants with two cars and internet access. But if I work diligently, within a year, we should be able to take the whole building Section 8, and we’ll make enough profit on it to make the mortgage payment on the kind of house we really want.
Since my announcement to friends that we’re moving to West Virginia, I’ve heard jokes galore. My favorite so far:
How do you tell a ‘middle class’ family in WV?
They have two cars in the yard up on blocks!
So, let’s hear your WV/redneck jokes! Let 'em roll.
Oh, and if you have questions about anything, go ahead and ask. I’ll answer what I can.
We do, however, as I think I said, have a covered patio, and there’s a good-size ‘yard’ surrounding the building, so cooking out should be easy! However, I’m not sure imported beer is allowed across state lines!