Yay Property Managers

Any guesses what this is a picture of? 

If you guessed water damage at our California house, you are correct!

When we found out we would be spending a year in England, we thought of four options of how to deal with our California house.

1. Sell it

Mike could have got on board with this option, but as the girls and I are attached to our home and neighborhood, this was never seriously considered.

2. Leave it

This option had the benefit of being the least amount of work. By leaving all our stuff as it was, we'd avoid the hassle of movers, packing, storage, finding renters, etc. We ended up giving up this option, mainly because we decided we couldn't afford it.

3. Leave It with Cheap Renters

The idea of this one was to leave all our stuff in the house and garage, and then rent the house at a greatly reduced rate because of the inconvenience. We did pursue this for a while, but weren't able to find just the right person. People would say they were interested, because the rent we were offering was really low, but then they'd want us to move this, store that, clear out these spaces, etc. If we had to do all that work, we decided we'd just as well get market rate rent.

4. Property Manager

We went with option number four, clear out the house and rent it at market rate using a property manager. As anyone who has ever moved or prepared a house for sale/rent knows, it was a tremendous amount of work and bother. I'm glad we never seriously considered renting it out on our own and trying to manage the house from overseas. Two reasons. One, after we arrived in England, the first renter lined up backed out, so the whole process of finding a new renter had to start all over again. How we would have managed that from England, I'm not sure.

Two, now apparently our roof is leaking. That is a tremendous bother. Someone has to arrange a handyman to come over to take care of the immediate problem, get roofers to do bids on the repair work, get the inside damage tested and removed, hire someone to drywall, hire someone to paint, and possibly more. The silver lining of this is that that person is not me. I'm not terribly happy to be paying these bills, but I'm sure happy that it's not me doing the work!