Taking the Plunge

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Taking the Plunge
How a lucky real estate dabbler became an overseas landlord.

Unfortunately not much went wrong with that cute little garden cottage, given how much I enjoyed strapping on the old Hechinger tool belt and showing up to save the day. I replaced the ceiling fan in the bedroom one Saturday. Unstuck the disposal a few times; nailed up a gutter. The only emergency was a drip from the ceiling that turned out to be a leaky air-conditioning compressor in the attic. Not to worry, ma'am. Have cordless drill, will travel.

In all, the cute little garden cottage conducted itself just as a well-behaved investment property should -- it largely disappeared from our lives, quietly stockpiling equity as someone else paid the mortgage. What a good little housie.

The next time, we weren't so lucky.

Everything that was easy with the first house was hard with the second. We were in better shape financially because we could refinance House A for cash to use as a down payment on House B. But it was 2003 by then, and home prices were on a rocket. It was easier to find an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Washington suburbs than a house for less than $200,000. That was the most we could pay and still break even with prevailing rents.

It took six months of non-starters and lost bids before Ann happened to be browsing the listings with a Realtor named Bob Young, another in our growing stable of agents. Right before their eyes, a new listing popped up, a modest brick ranch off New Hampshire Avenue for $180,000. They were at the front door within minutes, and we made an offer that day. I never even went inside the place.

Such a bargain. A few weeks later we found out why.

The title search quickly flushed two hidden bankruptcies from the seller's closet, along with an undisclosed second mortgage that was 10 years in arrears. We put the champagne cork back in the bottle, and for about two months the deal lay on the table with unresponsive pupils. Still, every few weeks Bob Young would dutifully make a round of calls, trying to work out a compromise between the sellers and the tough and shadowy holder of the second mortgage. Finally, he persuaded her to cut her losses. She would give up some of the accrued interest if we would pay a few thousand dollars more.

It was a huge relief when we finally closed in the fall, four months later than we'd hoped. (And I still hadn't been inside the house.) But now we had to rush. It was only a week before the end of the month, turnover time for rental houses. We spit on our hands and got busy with yardwork, re-enameling the tub and carpeting. The house dressed up nicely, and after five straight post-midnight painting sessions, Ann put down the roller for the last time, just two days before our advertised open house.

Twelve hours later, they called us about the fire.

All the firetrucks were gone by the time I got there, but I could still smell the smoke from the yard. The boxwood hedge was scorched, and there were long streaks of melted glue on the walk where workers had dragged some burning carpet out the front door. Thick tongues of soot, all leading out from the utility closet, decorated the ceilings throughout the ground floor. That's where the carpet installers had placed their contact cement -- apparently very flammable contact cement -- a bit too close to the base of the gas water heater. It was the throat of a volcano in there. The water heater looked like something by Dali. Even the boiler was cooked, its glass dials shattered and the wires burned away.

Ann's 50-hour paint job was totally ruined. For the first time, real estate brought us to tears.

There was nothing to do but start over, double time. We postponed the open house by a week and drove the reluctant carpet company to replace the hot water heater, the boiler and, of course, the carpet. The company also got a crew of painters in and, happily, the house began to smell more like wet latex than fried polyester.