CarrboroWeb- Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina- Layman's Guide to Real Estate- Case Study #2 & 3

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Case Study
Properties #2 & 3

Property #2 Sertoma Road

This was an 1100 sq foot house on 1 acre in the county. The house was 2 bedrooms but we figured we could expand the house and add bedrooms and offices if we needed. The problem was that there was an uncooperative tenant who wouldn't let it be shown, so we were unable to get inside. I didn't thnk it was wise to put an offer on a house that I couldn't get into. Oh, yeah, the price was $155,000 which would have meant less financing for us.

Property #3 Ivey Road

This was a great property! 3.8 acres with two houses(one 1800 sq feet and one 1100 sq feet), a mobile home, a large barn, a 400 sq foot office building and a 3 car garage. I would have sold one of my rentals to finance the property(they wanted $435,000), lived in the small house and rented the large one. We would use the office space for the salon and office and I had visions of setting up an indoor wiffle ball field in the barn.

I checked into this property but found out there were a few weird things about it. The land was zoned for 1 house every 2 acres. That meant that if one house burned down or was destroyed(we do get tornadoes and the occasional hurricane here!), we wouldn't be able to rebuild unless we could convince a neighbor to sell us .2 acres.(I can only imagine how much that would cost us!)

The other thing was that both houses were only approved for 2 bedroom septic systems. That sounded like it could be a real problem if one of the systems failed and we had to go back to get another permit. Was there a reason that they were only approved for 2 bedrooms? We didn't ask to find out….

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