felix, the reason I ask is that a lot of people on Piggington’s believe that the “ultimate” bottom of the market is when you can buy a property with N % down, rent it out, and get a positive cash flow. If N = 20%, that’s pretty good. If N = 10%, that’s even better. If N = 5%, that’s fantastic. In theory, you should never be able to get to N = 0%. Providing real numbers would let people calculate the value of N for your house.
The other reason I ask is that the experienced rental property owners on this site have talked about “unexpected” costs of owning a rental unit. Besides financing, you have to consider taxes, maintenance, vacancy, insurance, and miscelaneous fees (like trash) if applicable. Its unclear whether you factored in all the parameters when you decided that you got a good deal. It seems like most first time investors don’t take all the costs into account and end up losing money because of it. There are experts on this site who can break down the details much better than I can.
Once you plug in the right numbers, then you can more accurately calculate the expected return on your investment. Then its up to you to decide if that’s a good return or not.
I certainly won’t press you to review personal information that you’re not comfortable sharing. At this point, telling us what numbers you used for vacancy rate, maintenace, etc and telling us your rate of return would basically give away the price you paid. I guess we’ll have to leave it at that. Hopefully, you took all the expenses into account and truly did get a good deal. If so, then we may be getting to the point where there are good buying opportunities again.
