Abandoned Ducati. You should abandon your children first

It must have been the beginning of November, '04 when the Duc' showed up. ! thought maybe one of the girls had a cool boy visiting her. Then it snowed. The Duc' hasn't moved. ! e mailed all the tenants. No one knew anything about it. One of the girls who bailed on me thought it belonged to a friend of her's who was out of town for the week. It still had temp tags on. Chris finally noticed the tags expired 12.17.3. Over a year ago. One wonders if she was stolen. The cops don't have a report. ! was going to try to get an abandoned vehicle title so ! could sell it to recoup some of my expenses. ! e mailed the city and they sent me a long list of things ! had to do. 1st thing was be a licensed tow company. In other words, ! get to store a vehicle for free on my property until ! give it to a tow company. They have to track down the owner. If they can't they get to post a bond and sell it to the public. They get to keep the 1st $1,200 and the rest goes to the city. What a scam. !'m going to start my own city.

Here's the building

They bailed

There's nothing like having tenants bail on you in the middle of the lease. Rose & Amy decided 7 months was long enough so they loaded up a truck and off they went into the night. !'ve heard nothing from them since. They had the old guy (Lamont) next door help them load the truck. They had promised Lamont a ride to WI for Christmas so he gave them $150 for expenses. When he went into his apartment for a bit they took off. Poor Lamont is on social security and barely has enough money to get by. ! guess they needed his money more than he did. Once ! got into the apartment ! saw the crappy job they had done painting. Every room was a different, hard to hide color. Chris sprayed on 5 gallons of Kilz and several gallons of white just to hide the green, purple, red, brown and orange. Then another 6 gallons of Navajo White. This was after ! spent 6 hours masking everything. The stove and 'fridge were filthy. ! made all the tenants a 6-pack of Honey Lager and delivered it to them the day before. Just 5 days 'til Christmas. ! would love some advice on how to put this on their credit score.

The work begins

The building inspector said everything was in fair condition for a building built in 1925. There were some problems of course. The old owner didn't do any work unless it would fall apart and then just did a half-assed hack job. The radiators drip a bit from the blowoff valves as radiators are wont to do. This had been going on long enough that the hardwood floors underneath had rotted out and the radiators were tipped down the wrong way. Not only was it ugly, but they couldn't drain properly so they banged and rattled. Chris (my contractor) and ! spent several weeks cutting out the rotted wood and replacing it w/ durarock covered w/ tile. Now they are level and impervious to water. ! got to paint every one of the radiators. Some were black. Some were white. One was gold. Then the leases started expiring. Tenants would move. ! guess they didn't like having the holes in their floors fixed and a manager who they could actually get in touch w/. As vacancies came up it was obvious that painting hadn't been done for nearly 10 years. ! wanted to do something special so no off-white. Yellow, blue, green. Alas, ! bought just as vacancies in one of the best rental 'hoods in Denver exploded. Low interest rates were drawing renters to ownership and thousands of new apartments were coming on the market as the recession hit. Rents were beginning to plunge. Must hang on.

A little about me.

My name is Doug!!. ! bought the Emma Parham Apartment building on June, 7 2002. Emma Parham is my niece. She is totally adorable. A lot has happened in 2 1/2 years. ! want to talk about some of these events and share solutions here.
! live in Denver, CO. Why did ! buy an apartment building? !'ve been a tax preparer for many years. As you may know there are some tax advantages to rental property. ! wanted to get in on some of them and also capture a bit more of the increase in property values around here. In mid 2001 ! left on a 4 1/2 month bike tour around the country and decided to rent out my house to defray some of the costs. ! hired a manager and was off. ! had expected to have to rent an apartment when ! returned to wait out their lease, but then hit upon a plan to buy a duplex. ! would live in one side and rent the other. Then when ! moved home ! could rent the other side too. After much searching ! finally found a suitable place. We were 2 weeks from closing when the owner backed out of the deal. Back into the market ! went. It had become apparent that duplex prices were outrageously high. Gene, my realtor, and ! started running numbers on small apartment buildings and found the returns would be much better than on duplexes. ! really liked the idea of not losing 1/2 the rent if 1 tenant moved out. Finally we found this building and decided it was the place. A lot of work and a lot of money are tied up in it. One day !'ll find out if it was all worth it.