The 45-Day Countdown: Day 37

Wow, one week to go in our attempt to replace our rental in California with rentals in New Mexico. We’ve oscillated from anything between two to four houses in an attempt to spend as close as possible to the same amount as the value of the one in California. It’s been a moving target, as house contracts fall through, leaving us with unexpected amounts of money. But it looks like 3 houses is going to be the magic number. Hard to believe, 3 nice houses in very good neighborhoods in Albuquerque, for the same price as one modest, older, rental in Livermore. Here’s a photo of the one in Livermore we sold:

Last time I posted about houses, on Day 29, we had made offers on 6 houses and closed on one. We’ve now made offers on 8 houses! It’s definitely been more difficult than I expected.

So far, we’ve actually completed the purchase of one house, and we are currently under contract for two more. Of the other 5 houses we’ve made offers on, one of them we got outbid, two of them the sellers counter-offered and we did not accept their counter offer, one we cancelled due to a septic installation disaster, and another one we are planning to cancel tomorrow due to unexplained standing water.

We found out on Friday during the inspection that there is a broken water main somewhere, and we don’t know where. There’s standing water near the house and out at the street around the water shut-off valve. That’s the one out in Rio Rancho. The city will go out and look to see if the issue is theirs or not, and it may be a simple fix. But because of our 45-day deadline, we don’t have time to wait for this to get resolved. And we don’t want to risk any sort of expensive issue.

That’s also the same house that has the storage addition that is not permitted, and violates zoning code (not that anyone cares about zoning code). But I used to be a city planner years ago, so I know too much for my own good. And I don’t think my tenants need a storage area that’s accessed from outside only, that includes skylights and lots of electric power. That sounds a lot like hydroponics to me.

So tomorrow we’re reluctantly going to cancel our contract on this very cute, low-priced home in Rio Rancho:

So we went ahead and put an offer on another one in the La Cueva school district in Albuquerque, which is the best school district in the region. Now we are under contract for two in that same neighborhood, not very far from each other. We hope everything goes well with these two: 

The top one passed its inspections on Friday (yay!) and will close soon. The bottom one we just got under contract on Saturday, and we will now try to schedule inspections as soon as possible.