do you plan on keeping your house for many, many years? (as an investment, etc)

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone!

Not the OP but I have a follow up question: DH wants to keep and rent out our current townhouse (first house) when we move into a bigger SFH, hopefully in the next several months. Do all of you rent out your homes yourself (or plan to) or do you use a management company?

We plan to move within our current neighborhood and DH wants to manage the rental himself. Is this reasonable? I do think he is very smart/business savy and he is a corporate attorney with lots of experience in real estate/contracts, but it still seems like a big headache to me. We have two small children, 4 and 1.

[Anonymous]

I manager our TH - if you pick the right tenant, the management is a breeze (assuming your property is in reasonable shape). Most of the work for us tends to be in turning the unit over and tenant selection. Do that right and the rest of the year should ideally be non-eventful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I manager our TH - if you pick the right tenant, the management is a breeze (assuming your property is in reasonable shape). Most of the work for us tends to be in turning the unit over and tenant selection. Do that right and the rest of the year should ideally be non-eventful.

We do too. I agree with this poster. Do your tenant screening thoroughly and you will be fine.

We started renting our row house in 2007 and we are only on our second tenant. We've been lucky with multi-year rentals.

I avoid group rentals--limit to 2 adults (kids okay). The row house is small 900sq feet, two bedroom two bath. Each tenant has been a professional couples--one even had their first baby while there. The other couple got engaged while living there. It is in a desirable NW neighborhood so easy to rent. The rental price weeds out college kids.

[Anonymous]

We live in a large house in Shepherd Park. Been here a year and will stay until we can no longer take the stairs. Kids are in ES.

[Anonymous]

Sold our starter home in silver spring and plan to stay in our current home forever (unless we opt to downsize or move to leisureworld). Just refinanced and can pay off the home in 15 years. Will definitely stay here until our kids are adults and completely out of the nest. Lots of empty nesters in our neighborhood living in big colonials with more room thn thy need, but folks don't seem to want to leave our nice little neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

So far we are planning to keep the house we bought in Mclean for many years or at least till kids are done with school. I am not a big fan of suburbia and hope to move back to the city at some point, so probably will either sell the house or keep it as a rental, but I am not so sure Mclean is a great rental market for a landlord, it's mostly home owners there. If downtown revitalizes and bus service becomes better, we may consider staying, we can walk there and we love the convenience/location/safety/amenities of the area overall.