Monday, December 17, 2018

Week 34 of Self Employment - I'm a Star!

Week 34 of Self Employment:
We are starting to breath easier around here for a number of reasons. Houlton Storage Garages' Building 5 is officially in the books (after having to label the breaker boxes and get paperwork in to the building inspector for the State plan review of the heaters). Building 5 is officially rented up but we still have a few units left to rent in the rest of the facility, 3 to be exact. All is well, however.
We got our gates powered up and figured out for the most part, next week we'll have to punch in all of the gate codes for the tenants and send those out. Nothing difficult, just a little tedious.
The week came and went without fixing the last 4 dawn to dusk lights. Maybe next week? I've been saying this for over 1.5 years. I think it's about time to get this right. The good news is that only 4 remain. The bad news is that 4 still remain.
We are still waiting for Xcel to install a meter for unit 1F so we can count it as an official unit. It's currently hotwired off of unit 1E so the power and lights work. That too saw the week come and go (for the 8th week in a row).
Installation on the security system was supposed to start but we ended up waiting most of the week for the locating the underground utilities. Let's see what next week entails.
We got some really good news regarding our funding. We found out that we had a sizeable amount of money left on the construction loan that we were able to take as an interest paid expense. The nice thing is that we more than made up for the quite substantial unplanned down payment expense for Building 5. So that is great. With tax season around the corner and other properties we're looking at, it's great to know we have some additional buffer. It was a much better Christmas gift than the Jelly of the Month Club.
Storage Garages of Hudson is finally getting some serious progress made. Building 3 is going up fast. See the pictures for progress. This all went up in 1 week (5 days). The contractor definitely deserves and attaboy on this one. They caught right up. Let's see if they can knock it out in Week 2.
Other items at SGH are scheduling to have the electrician get wiring complete for Building 3 so it's ready to rent at any time. We just want to make sure they don't need to get into any units once the tenants have moved in.
One thing we were worried about at this site was plowing with the gravel parking lots. We got our first plowable snowfall and the plow guys did pretty well. We'll likely have to pick a little gravel out of the landscaping but that's almost to be expected. Especially with gravel parking lots. But we got through it and it should be pretty well glazed over for future snowfalls.
I'm sorry to report we didn't get a bunch of money back from this property. I guess you can't win them all!
Other: I continue to look at properties, far and wide. I have some promising ones but they probably aren't going to pop anytime real soon. As many may know or notice, prices on real estate are at an alltime high. For me that mainly means that I just have to search harder for reasonable deals. Not to mention a lot of people are holding onto their cash flowing properties so not much is really for sale in the warehouse space. In the meantime I continue to network and knock on doors of properties that I think might fit into our business plan. Deals are out there, I just have to work a little harder to find them.
I'm officially a mentor for SelfStorageInvesting.com . That's pretty fun for me. I'm looking forward to taking on my first mentee/student. I think they're going to use me in the role of self storage developer to hopefully assist the clients in getting their new building/facility built. This will start around the first of the year. I really look forward to being a part of this community. I'm also going to take advantage of their events as much as possible. I'll likely give more details on this as I get more involved after the first of the year.
And lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Gretchen Heinen's podcast came out last week in which I talk about Angie and my road to self employment. If this sounds intriguing, definitely give it a listen.

Link to podcast: Net Worth It Podcast




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