Fat Property is proud to join and support the Museum District Business Alliance.  Our goal as a company is to better the community we live and invest in.  This goal is shared by the MDBA

“Our Mission: To promote enterprise and the arts, making the Montrose/Museum District more attractive for businesses, residents, and investors by improving the public enjoyment of the area and combating community deterioration.”

If you’re a business owner in the area, we would strongly suggest joining this great group.

 

 

We’ve been getting a lot of inquires about our multifamily and single family properties for sale.  As our multifamily properties tend to stay full, and even our single family properties for sale are all rented, doing showings is difficult. We respect our tenants privacy and enjoyment of their home, as such our policies for showing might be a bit more than most buyers are accustomed to.

Before setting up a showing, we try to make sure that everything someone might need or want to know about the property has been supplied.  Financials, photos, descriptions  and answers to any questions.  But with all that, we’re often left with the question “When can I view the unit/home?”

So rather than say the same thing every time over the phone or via e-mail, we’ve typed up a page that talks about our policy when it comes to showing occupied units.  We call them “LWO” – “Listed While Occupied”.

So if you’re curious how you see the inside of our properties for sale, check out our LWO site

What are bitcoins?  Well, that’s not what this post is about.  If you’ve never heard of them, you (likely) well.

Fat Property is proud to announce a partnership with Houston Bits to start accepting rental payments using bitcoins.  More information will follow so stay tuned!

No one is going to accuse us of being professionals when it comes to staging (what’s that?), photographing our properties/units (done with cell phone cameras), or advertising in general (thankfully we’re in Montrose).

At our 56 unit Holman property, one of the units was used as our on-site office.  Of the 30+ units we’ve upgraded for new tenants, the office was not one of them.  This created a problem for prospective tenants that wanted to see what a ‘finished’ unit looks like.  When someone comes by, normally any finished units have people in them so they’re hard to show.  The other empty units are all being worked on so we end up showing someone a “UIP” (Unit in Progress).

So solve the issue, we decided to actually upgrade the office unit.  That was easy enough as our guys have done over 30 of these same units so far.  However, this time we decided to have it staged.  We got the guys at Showcase Staging to help us.  We’re happy with their work.  Not only does our on-site team have a nice place to work in, but we now have a unit we can always (and easily) show prospective tenants who want to see what an upcoming unit will look like.

Check out our Holman property page for more info.  A few of the ‘after shots’ are below.

      

     

We’ve recently bought our first property in Spring Branch.  A 46 unit mix of studios, 1 bedrooms, and 2 bedrooms.  While not the greatest looking building at the moment, this property is well running and almost full.  We plan on making mostly cosmetic improvements in the short term. Below is a picture we found online (and not exactly flattering).  As the property is improved, we’ll be sure to take some good ‘after’ photos.

Units start as low as $300 a month for studios, $400 for 1 bedrooms, and $500 for 2 bedrooms.

Spring Branch is starting to become more and more popular due to all the energy activity and it’s proximity to downtown Houston.  While we are still giant fans of inner loop locations such as Montrose, midtown, and Heights, we also realize that those locations are getting harder and harder to buy into due to limited supply of properties and increased demand from buyers.

We’re sad to announce our sale of 4315 Jack St.  This property was purchased mid last year (2012).  It was a mess and we had a great time fixing it up.  Even though we had it less than a year, we were able to repaint the exterior, upgrade (heavily) 9 of the 10 units, clear out massive amounts of trash, demo the old shed and parking roof, and stabilize the income — raising it by 45% (to renters that rent increase sounds like a bad thing, but it’s the stabilized market rent that allows for upgrades and repairs to the property. The previous rent was a large factor in why the property was distressed and ultimately sold to us).

Our job there is now done and it’s time for a new owner to take it to the next level. The new owner is an experienced operator in the area and we’re sure she’ll do great.

So why are we sad, and why did we sell?  We’re first and foremost a company interested in growth and adding more units to our holdings.  However, the reality of financing in today’s market dictates much of what we do.  By selling the property on Jack, we are able to fund the growth of much larger properties (which may be sold at some point to fund even more).  A more complicated answer involves a moment towards additional leverage as there was a lot of equity in the property. A less complicated answer is that if financing were easy, we’d likely never sell anything.

At the same time, we’re happy to announce that we’ve now officially purchased the Wipprecht property.  We had been managing it for a few weeks in preparation of buying, but the ink is now dry and it’s a done deal.  We’re VERY excited to get this place cleaned up.  Stay tuned for some interesting before and after pictures!

According to this interesting story, yes.  When people ask us why we invest so much in Houston, it’s stories like these that help us answer that question.

Another reason we love Houston.

 

Well folks, it’s not much to look at from the outside today, but we’ll be working on it.  The property consists of an 8 unit building, a 4 unit building  and an empty lot for parking.  Address is 3721 Tuam, Houston TX, 77004.

Each unit is a 2 bedroom / 1 bath.  The good new is: We’re going to be renting them cheap while we work on the place.  The rent will be $400 for a 2 bedroom (about a third of what it would be a few miles away in Montrose), and we’ll offer an “All Bills Paid” option if someone wants it for $100/month.  So $500 for an all-bills-paid two bedroom.  Minutes from downtown, Montrose, Heights, Rice University, Medical Center, the new rail line, and University of Houston.

So you’re excited, I know.  You must have a unit now. I get it. Well, contact us to view and lock it up!(Picture is of the four unit building. Off street parking. We don’t have interior shots at this time)

As we celebrate 4 months with the property, we thought we’d share a bit of what’s been done.  Our accounting is normally done on the trailing month, so we don’t have February numbers yet. This will be from October 15th to Feb 1.  So 3 and a 1/2 months.  Less than 16 weeks, but we’ll round up.

While we haven’t been able to do as much “prettying up” on the outside, there has been much more ‘under the hood’ work to do that anyone realized.  Once we got our hands on the property and started to dig in, we got to see just how big of a project it was.  Each time we try to pull guys off to do “pretty-up” projects, they get pulled to upgrade a unit for a new tenant, or troubleshoot an electrical issue, or fix a leaking pipe, or to replace a window, or to toss someone out (kidding about that last one… Maybe… 🙂

After four “short” months, we feel we’re over the hump.  We have many of the units upgraded and a stable tenant base to move forward   We can finally hit some projects we’ve been dying to do like landscaping, exterior paint, windows, and more.  But before we get into what we still want to do, let’s look at some fun numbers of what’s been done:

Trash:  If we tried to explain the amount of trash generated from the building upgrade, or what we’ve had to disposed from previous tenants, you’d think we were lying.  To date, we’ve gotten rid of an estimated  200 yards of trash.  To put that in perspective, that would fill a box that was over a MILE LONG by a MILE WIDE and a foot tall!  Math geeks: Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.  And to our neighbors: We realize there is still trash outside.  We’re getting rid of it as fast as those roll off containers can come.

Units: The building consists of 56 units.  At this point, we’ve upgraded 30 of them.  And by “upgrade” that includes: Taking out the carpet, which is over the original hardwood floors, taking off the paneling on the walls, which is over the drywall (you can start to see where the trash comes from).  Sanding and refinishing the wood floors (not easy, the floors are beautiful, but they’re 75 years old). Painting the whole unit. New toilets, new vanity, new light fixtures, outlets, switches. New front doors, new window blinds, and more.  Upgrading a unit normally takes a good amount of time.  We’ve been upgrading units at a pace of about 2 a week since we’ve owned the place.  And this has to be coordinated with new leases to minimize downtime to help fund these upgrades.   It’s a balancing act: The manager gets yelled at by the owner if a unit is ready but not leased.  The manager gets yelled at by a tenant if the unit is leased and not ready.  Poor guy 🙂

Building interior:  It was, quite frankly, disgusting.  There is a lot of common area interior space (large open hallways). We thank our first “pioneer” tenants who moved in before this was addressed (they’ve been rewarded by lower rent. As the building gets better, rents go up. So bravery has it’s rewards).   In the last few months we’ve ripped out all the carpet in all of the common area hallways.  We’ve peeled up all the plywood and linoleum tile that was stuck over the entry and exists.  We’re in the process of cleaning and sanding the wood floors that were underneath.   We’ve fixed countless holes in the drywall.  Cleaned and painted most of the walls.  Removed dozens of signs that are, thankfully, no longer applicable (“No sleeping in hallways!”).   Each unit has a few windows looking into the hallway, each with several glass panes.  16 panes of glass per unit.  I’d estimate that half were broken and boarded up.  That’s almost 500 panes of glass that had to be replaced just in the interior units (we’re not done with this, but we’ve got most!).  The interior has also received new lighting: 16 recessed high end, low power, LED lights per building; 48 total.  This replaces the old florescent tube lights.  Also 20 hanging pendant lights per building; 60 total.   So over 100 new lights and lighting fixtures between the three building interior hallways to add safety and style.

Outside:  This is where we haven’t done as much as we’d like.  We’ve been primarily focused on units, and getting them ready for new tenants.  Each time we’re ready to tackle some “outside’ projects, our team gets called in to get a new unit ready, put in some new lighting, do the floors, or any number of the above listed projects.  That’s not to say nothing has been done.   We’ve ripped out most of the concrete in the center courtyard area to prep for our new landscaping   We’ve taken off the old ugly awnings (and put one new one on to see what we thought of it).  We’ve started some painting of the exterior non-brick surfaces.  We’ve put on a few black solar screens to help with energy efficiency but also the look of the property.   With the property better stabilized, this will be our next big effort. We’ve recently pulled permits to replace and fix bad fascia and soffits, after which all will be repainted along with all window trim.  After landscaping, we’ll be adding gated entry and perhaps replacing the railing work that exists now.  If there are any exterior / landscape designers that would like to volunteer their time, we’re open to it.  As we’ve mentioned many times: Design is NOT our strong suite 🙂

Cost: We debated sharing this, but figured why not.  As of Feb 1, there has been:

• $87,000 in labor
• $100,000 in materials
• $12,000 in misc costs and credits for cleaning
• Note this doesn’t include costs after Feb 1.

So about $200,000 spent so far in the 16 weeks we’ve owned the property, just under $2,000 a day.

We’re excited to have given this building a new life.  We still have a LOT of work to do but we feel the winds at our back now and the rest is stuff that’s more along the lines of “nice to do” vs. the other stuff that was critical to the property running correctly at all.

Have any questions or comments?  Feel free to leave them below, or check out our Holman page and feel free to share there.