Our first team member

So Mum and I are back home after a busy day of getting things done. 

The afternoon edition was incredibly boring!  We spent several hours hanging around at Pepboys while they replaced an arthritic ball joint in Galileo’s left front suspension.  I’m glad we had lunch before we had the work done!

Lunch was good and our waitress was great.  (And cute, but I digress…  (I wonder if she’d be interested in managing a B&B?  But I digress still further!)

Things took so long at Pepboys (not their fault.  We didn’t get there until lunch time and because they were booked solid at the moment we went off to get lunch first…) we didn’t get back in time to pick up my Armani suit at the cleaners.  I’ll have to get that Monday after work and bring it to the consignment shop next Saturday.  But that’s worthy of a blog post all its own.  :-)

Now the morning edition is the part you may be more interested in, ‘specially if your reading this blog.

After floundering a bit with our latest real estate adventure and not getting much accomplished, yesterday Mum took the initiative and made a few phone calls. 

I really can’t do much phone work because of my Just Over Broke.  A while back my boss bitched me out for making calls during work hours – even though I was still getting my work done even as I talked on the phone.  “It sounds like an MLS office around here!”  My day job is mechanical design on SolidWorks 3D CAD so reading back MLS numbers to make sure I’m looking at the right listing and having Realtor.com up in a small window off to the side of my screen really doesn’t go over too well.

So anywho, Mum was unable to find a commercial real estate lawyer who sounded worthy of our time.  One actually wanted to know all the details of the deal up front.  Mum responded “I am not at liberty to reveal any details at this time.”  You done good, Mum!  He sounded like the kind of skunk who’d run right out and get it under contract himself and cut us right out of the deal!  In fact I saw his name on several signs listing commercial property for lease while we were out.

Failing to find a lawyer to help out with keeping this deal as strictly a FSBO I suggested we try to find a buyer’s agent.  Mum found one and we met in person at his office this morning.  Our first team member is now firmly on board and he likes the sound of this deal.  More than that, he’s been involved in the real estate game as an investor himself in the two to four family market.  That’s exactly the kind of help we need.  This deal is for a fourteen unit apartment complex, so it’s bigger than any of his, but it’s not that much of a stretch.

As Mum and I were talking about this latest step I used the analogy: “Our ship is on the launch pad and being fueled.”  Once we own this property we will have lift off.  With two more like it we will have reached orbit.  From there who knows how far we’ll go!