Mike & Katie's Happy Birthday to Gary

Hi Gary

Just wanted to send you a note to say Happy Birthday! I’d sing you a song, but you might regret donating those stem cells! J

Did you know that a resort-like situation, which we call Stonewall View, has fallen into our laps in the past few months?

Katie’s dad, Bob, owns a 4-bedroom house, plus a duplex next door to our house. Unfortunately, Bob and Rita are now in their mid-80s and are rapidly slowing down health-wise. Bob had open heart surgery a few years ago and the loss of blood to his brain damaged his short-term memory. He still has his great personality, but he can’t really handle money stuff anymore. He’s such a great guy, it’s sad to watch. We just keep loving him along the way.

For the past 15 years Katie’s brother-in-law, Andy, has managed this property, renting them out to hunters and gas-field workers at pretty low cost. Because these have been low-end renters, they often have not paid at all. And they have not taken very good care of the property either. It is ugly and in need of lots of repair.

A few years ago Andy & Susie (Katie’s sister) moved from Stonewall to Hawaii with YWAM. At the same time, Andy has been managing the property long-distance and finding it very frustrating and expensive. Finally, in January he handed the apartments over to us to manage.

We tried to sell the property, but couldn’t due to some water-rights issues (the apartments share our well).

So it was either tear them down to get rid of an eyesore (which would cost money and bring in nothing), or fix them up nicely and try to rent them out to higher-end renters for better income. There was some money in the Stonewall View account, so we chose the latter. Even so, we’ve had to take out a mortgage on the house in order to pay for the renovations on the apts.

For the past 5 months we’ve invested tons of time, effort, design & money into making the 2 apartments nice. Once we got into it, we discovered that things were worse than we thought. We actually had to tear out the flooring in both apts due to dry-rot and rebuild the whole inside from scratch. Both apts are now nice and solid. One apt is almost finished and looks amazing. Like one guy said when he saw it, “This is a miracle!” We still have to fix up the roofing and siding as well as furnish everything.

Hopefully we can start renting out one apt by September. We need to recoup some of our investment before we can finish the other apt. In another year or two we hope to begin renovating the house, landscaping, etc.

Anyway, maybe you can give us some good advice about managing holiday apartments like this. We’re complete novices! Any suggestions / ideas you might have would be most welcome! What ways have you found to attract responsible, well-paying renters and keep them coming back?

Well, this turned into a much longer note than I had planned. Anyway, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Love
Mike (& Katie)