What's up with this
banner thing?
If
you don't see a navigation bar on the left, CLICK HERE
|
|
|
Spinning My Tires is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy. E-mails are welcomed--if you have thoughts of your own to share, please send them. Additional Spinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page. 11/1/06 Where have I been and where am I going? Okay, okay, enough with the E-mails,
guys! I’m still alive, the Buick is still in pieces in my garage, and you
haven’t missed anything with the car. But I’ll answer all your questions
here and let you know what’s going on and why I’ve been so conspicuously
absent. Last year, diligent readers will recall
that I “flipped” a house in my spare time (I hate the term “flip” which
isn’t very accurate anyway). I did pretty well on the sale, which closed
before the house was even complete. I made some good money and figured that
I’d try one or two a year to supplement my income as director of marketing for
a non-profit hospital group here in Cleveland. I believed that the Buick could
get fast-tracked to completion with the extra cash, and that’s when I started
tearing the engine apart in anticipation of taking it to the machine shop. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always
work the way we plan. The entire marketing staff at my office was outsourced to
a marketing firm. It was pretty underhanded the way it went down (the job went
to—ahem—an attractive, young female board member’s firm), and I
found myself suddenly unemployed for the second time in as many years. It sucks
but I wasn’t singing the Unemployment Blues
this time because I had a cushion to land on. That cushion was my success at
renovating and selling my first investment house. I had confidence that I could
support my family. The day after I was canned, I started looking for a new
project and anxious to start working for myself. I figured I could flip four or
five houses a year and make a lot more than I was making at my desk job. I started looking for houses in my
hometown, Shaker Heights, my home for all of my 36 years. I quickly found one
just five blocks from my residence, making walking to work possible. The house
was in decent shape, and I figured that Shaker Heights, Ohio’s excellent
reputation throughout the state would make the property an easy sell when it was
done. I bought the house and got to work. We called it “Harwood Compound
West” and our home became, of course, Harwood Compound East. And herein lies the rub: the City of
Shaker Heights, ostensibly to “maintain the quality of housing stock,” has a
policy that absolutely strangles investors like me: each house has a city
inspection before it is sold. The seller can fix the violations or the buyer can
assume them. Of course, since my house was a bank foreclosure, I had to assume
the violations, of which there were 7 pages. Not a problem, right? Wrong. The dark side of the law is this: Take the violations list to an “official” Shaker Heights contractor (who is just a guy who has paid the city a kickback of some kind to become “official”). Have that contractor prepare a quote to fix all the violations, though he doesn’t have to do the work. Then you take that total number, multiply it by 150%, and give that pile of cash to the City of Shaker Heights to hold in escrow until they’re satisfied that the violations have been repaired. So in addition to buying the house, I had to cough up another $35,000, in cash, just for the privilege of restoring a house in Shaker Heights. There were some other headaches in this transaction, some of which put me and the Housing department on opposite sides of the ring, and it was an uphill battle all the way. Instead of welcoming me and being grateful that someone was repairing the #1 nuisance property in Shaker, they treated me like a criminal on whom they just couldn’t quite get enough evidence to convict. The city started throwing their weight around and it sucked. Why didn't I bail out before all this
happened? I had a month already invested in this house. It would take a while to
find another, and at least another month to close on it. That's 2-3 months
wasted, doing nothing, not getting started on my new career. That's why. This is the short version, and there were many more pains in my neck in the subsequent 8 months, most attributable to the city, but I finally prevailed and finished the house by working 7 days a week for a few months. You can see the finished product at my business web site www.century-partners.com/3564_Strathavon/3564_Strathavon_Rd.htm and here are some before and after photos of the place.
The down side is that the headaches
delayed my new career and there was no way I could do three or four houses this
year—I’ll be lucky to move just one. Today, the housing market flat-out
sucks. I can’t give away my houses, particularly because Shaker Heights also
has the distinction of having the highest taxes in the state of Ohio. Those two
factors mean that both my houses in Shaker Heights are virtually worthless. I
haven’t made a penny since February, and because of the city’s policies with
the 150% rule, I have $35,000 racked up on my credit cards waiting for Harwood
Compound West to sell. Nice, eh? In fact, I was so disgusted with the
whole lousy process that I decided to get out of Shaker Heights entirely and put
my residence up for sale, too. I’ve lived here for 36 years, started a
business in town, tried to help rebuild my own community, and the city
bureaucracy left such a bad taste in my mouth that I’m leaving for good. Of course, all
along, Julia was looking for our next project, and switched to looking for our
next residence. I wanted a fixer-upper, some land, a decent-sized house with a
multi-car garage. Sure enough, we found a place almost right away. We bought it
because it was so right. Today, we’re carrying two mortgages and the pile of
money that’s trapped in the investment house. I’ve resorted to doing
contracting on the side and have remodeled several kitchens to keep the cash
flowing, but it’s just a trickle, not a river. We’re also trying to fix up
the new place to the point that it is comfortable for when we move in, whenever
that is. We’re trying to do it for nothing because we’re so cash poor and
have a mountain of credit debt. Feh. And that, my friends, is why nothing has
happened on the Buick for nearly a year. The good news? Well, at the moment,
there isn’t much. The new house has great potential, a 3-car garage and plenty
of land on which to build my dream
garage. When these houses sell, I’ll be back on my feet and getting back
to work. I’m going to start aiming for houses nearer to my new home,
Chesterland, Ohio. Houses there are easier to market, even though the initial
buy-in is greater. Invest more, make more. Fill in the gaps with contracting
work. Be happy. I should be honest with you, however: work on the Buick probably won't resume in full until that shop is built. The existing garage isn't really ideal for restoration work, and I'm not going to spend the time nor the money to make it such. It is adequate to allow me to assemble a chassis, so I'm going to aim for that ASAMSFA (As Soon As Money Starts Flowing Again). Now if I could only figure out how to move a fully disassembled 1941 Buick...
See you next month (hopefully)! E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net This page accessed Thanks, Fidget! |
