Sure, it's another hare-brained scheme. That's kind of our specialty. We're like "I Love Lucy" that way.
More often than not, they succeed, which is why we keep doing it. When they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, i.e. Bako.
Last summer's big scheme was buying a house here. When the boyfriend first proposed it, I was aghast, primarily because it meant accepting a life sentence in Bakersfield with little probability of parole. However, looking at it rationally, it made a certain amount of sense. At the time we both had jobs that we nominally liked. Although they didn't pay much, the cost of living here was so low we'd been able to approach our former lifestyle. Minus the nice things. Houses here were so cheap that it was actually cheaper to buy than to rent. And if and when we did blow this taco stand, we could always rent the house out and make a tidy little profit in the process.
So we bought a house.
We hadn't even cleared escrow when things started to go awry. First, my job was eliminated, leaving me jobless during the holiday season. Then the boyfriend's boss, the one who made his job so enjoyable, was sacked and replaced with a petty little tyrant who promptly extended everyone's hours and cut their pay. By the time we actually moved into the house, we were both miserable.
We thought about renting out the house and bailing, but one thing we hadn't really considered was the deadbeat nature of our neighbors. Judging by the number of posted eviction notices I see when I walk the dogs, renting out a house in this neighborhood doesn't necessarily guaranty you'll actually receive any rent.
We felt trapped.
But then something happened last week that gave us both a new sense of hope.
The house on the corner went up for sale!
It's a mirror image of our house and was used as a rental. It sits on a much busier intersection and hadn't been kept up well at all. The tenant moved out around the first of July and a "FOR RENT" sign popped up a few days later. That lasted until last week when it was replaced by a big, hard swinging "FOR SALE" sign. We noted the web address and looked it up to see what it was listed for, and imagine our shock when we saw it was priced $60K over what we paid.
"They'll never get that" we both said, but Sunday we saw they were having an open house. The boyfriend went down to check it out. He says the house is in worse shape than this one ever was. He decided to grill the agent about the pricing and was informed that not only did they feel it was priced aggressively for the market, they already had one all-cash offer on the table.
So what gives? If anything, the economy in Bako is worse than when we arrived. I was under the impression prices were still falling, not rising.
Well...it turns out Bako nearly tops the list for rental home investors!
Prices here are so rock bottom and there is such a glut of homes that outsiders are swooping in and snatching them up as rentals. Since rents are so much higher than the mortgage, you can make a handsome profit. And if you own ten or twenty homes, you can weather the loss of one or two deadbeat tenants. If you live in a neighborhood, like us, with good schools ("good" being a relative concept here in Bako), prices are actually rising.
The boyfriend invited the agent over to appraise our house and he said he can easily get us $50K or more than what we paid.
Just on case he's blowing smoke up our ass, we're having a different agent come by tonight.
If we like what we hear, we're putting this puppy up for sale and getting the fuck out of Hooterville.
And go where? Do what?
Well, that's the hare-brained part of the scheme we having really figured out yet.
Our motto this week is "Leave first, ask questions later."
