CHAPTER THREE: House Hunting Continued - 51 Manson Street

At the next meeting at the Bargain Registry, we were joined by Kirsty the mortgage coordinator. Gershwin's ebullience seemed slightly diminished because he had to sit back and let her do the talking. His dark eyes flickered restlessly back and forth between us, and I could see it was difficult for him to stay mute. His plump body, filling a chair in a corner of the room, constantly twitched and shifted as his seething energy sought release. One minute he was wiping his damp brow, the next minute he was clearing his throat or fidgeting with pencils. The room fairly hummed with the vibrations emanating from his corner.

After taking down all the details of my earnings, assets, and debts, Kirsty performed some calculations and pronounced me fit for a mortgage up to $50,000. A slow hissing came from Gershwin's corner as he literally let off emotional steam. I realized this must have been a tense moment for him. If I wasn’t approved for a mortgage, he would lose a client.

He burst forth from his chair, like a black retriever at a duck shoot, straining against his leash, ready to bolt into action to retrieve a fallen bird. His Cheshire-cat grin shone out in full force. Now I was approved, the search for a house could begin in earnest.

Kirsty got up to leave, and I edged out the door with her before Gershwin could entangle me in another verbal diatribe. I didn’t feel up to it that night.

"I'll be in touch," he called after me as I got into my car.

Sure enough, a few days later, Gershwin's supremely self-confident tones oozed over the phone lines as he told me he had a property that might interest me in the City of Schemmerhorn, twenty-five minutes’ drive away.

"I know, I know," he continued quickly, before I could say a word. "You're not really keen on Schemmerhorn, but this house is in your price range, it already has tenants, and needs hardly any work."

After an endless procession of run-down properties, each with some major defect to be remedied, or requiring significant electrical upgrading, I thought I might as well take a look. We arranged to meet at the house the following evening.

I took Wim along with me, ready to spot any structural defects, damp spots, or upgrading requirements. It was a freezing February night, and the roads were icy. The fifteen-mile journey took us forty minutes of careful driving through suburban neighborhoods. All sensible bodies were inside in the warm, and the streets were deserted. A little snow sprinkled the ground, and with the lights twinkling from the windows of the houses, Manson Street appeared to be a rather pretty, typical American street.

My first impression of the house was a very favorable one. It had aluminum siding on the front, which wouldn’t need repainting every few years, and in the darkness I couldn’t make out the wooden siding on the sides that would need repainting quite soon.

Gershwin had warned the tenants that we were coming. I don’t know whether they had cleaned and tidied especially for the occasion, but the apartments didn’t look too bad. The tenants of the first-floor apartment were three young adults in their early twenties: Melissa, her boyfriend Greg, and his brother Tom. Both men sported big muscles--most likely the result of working out on the variety of weight machines that were gently dripping oil onto the beige carpet of the dining room. Melissa, on the other hand, looked malnourished with a pale complexion and long, fair hair; she could have done with some of her roommates’ bulk. The three of them sat huddled together on a couch in the living room, watching us as we moved through the apartment.

The layout was typical of a great many American two-family houses: large living room at the front, large kitchen at the back, dining room and bathroom in the middle, and three smallish bedrooms down the right-hand side. The first-floor bathroom was extra large and boasted a big whirlpool bath and mirrored wall--quite fancy and a nice feature for attracting future tenants. Lamps bathed everything in a cozy glow and hid any slight defects. Wim prowled around poking into this and that, but came up with no major faults.

Behind the house lay a small square of straggly grass and a large, new, wooden deck--another nice feature. Beyond a wire fence at the end of the yard was a large graveyard; maybe not to everyone’s taste, but at least the neighbors behind were quiet.

We went back through the apartment and said our goodbyes and thank yous to Melissa, Greg, and Tom. They didn’t seem to have moved at all and looked back at us with blank expressions, though Melissa managed a feeble smile.

Out the door and in the next we went, and up the stairs to the second floor. In response to our knock, the door was opened by a young black girl with the biggest Afro hairdo I’d ever seen. She invited us in amiably enough and then retreated to the couch--apparently the place to sit while people looked over ones home. Three young children hung around her knees, ranging in age from about three to six years old.

We followed the girl into the living room to take a look at a little square room that opened off it over the downstairs hallway. A big door led out onto a small balcony over the front porch. Wim went through to check it out.

We headed back through the living room. I assumed the young girl was Natasha Fluff, the tenant, but apparently she was a friend of hers, for at that moment Natasha was fast disappearing into a bedroom leading off of the dining room. As the door closed behind her with a definite click, we looked expectantly to the friend, but she offered no explanation.

The rest of the apartment was nicely furnished and looked clean enough. The layout was basically the same as the first floor, except for the extra room at the front, a smaller bathroom, and a larger dining room. It also had brown-painted wood floors instead of carpet. An expensive-looking flowered rug lay on the living room floor in front of a huge entertainment center that took up a large chunk of wall next to the little square room. The dining room sported an octagonal glass and bamboo dining table, and a tall, octagonal fish tank bubbled away by the window.

At the back of the kitchen was a door with stairs that led down to the basement and up to the attic that stretched the whole length of the house. Natasha used the attic for drying clothes, as evidenced by the washing lines hanging between the rafters. Wim, of course, had to check it out.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention Gershwin throughout our tour of the house. He, of course, led us from room to room, babbling on unceasingly about this and that and assuring us that this was a good buy. The entire house had apparently been recently refurbished by a guy from Long Island, who was in the business of buying old houses, doing them up, and then selling them. I think the reason I forgot to mention Gershwin was that Wim and I just tuned him out. We absorbed ourselves in looking at everything, and Gershwin's chatter was merely background noise. We only needed to grunt the occasional acknowledgment to keep him happy.

After looking over the house, I felt almost as enthusiastic as our chatty realtor. I think Wim experienced a sense of déjà vu as I prattled excitedly all the way home, though he did admit that the house seemed solid and the floors didn’t slope. We’d seen so many older houses where the floors sloped noticeably.

The next day, I called Gershwin. He answered the phone with his usual exuberance.
“Schemmerhorn is quite a bit further than I really wanted, but I think I’m interested in buying the house,” I told him. “After all, the fact that there are tenants already in residence and the good condition of the house will kind of compensate for the extra distance, I hope.”

“You bet! I’ll get right on to the seller and start the ball rolling,” Gershwin promised.

I didn't think to wonder if the fact that the house was on Manson Street might be a bad omen.

CHAPTER TWO: House Hunting for an Investment - The Smarmy Realtor

I began looking in the newspaper every Sunday, went to open houses, and called tons of agents. At one point, I had about ten different realtors trying to help me. However, when they discovered how little I could afford - which meant little commission for them - their interest rapidly waned. I dropped a few of the more obvious ones for this reason. The others drifted away, one by one.

The problem was, I didn't really like anything I saw, and the houses I did like always had some fault. For example, either the basement was too wet, or the windows were out of line, which meant the house was leaning, etc., etc. My hopes were raised and dashed many times, as were those of my more faithful agents. The realtors only had so much stamina, and then they were gone.

Emotionally, this was a very trying time for me. I'm a very softhearted person, and it distressed me greatly to see an agent become all excited about a house he was positive would be ideal for me, and then to watch the defeated expression come into his eyes when I found a fault, or simply didn't like it. Sometimes I was tempted to just buy the house so I could make his day.

One day I noticed an ad in the paper for Many Low-Priced Houses Available. I called the number listed in the ad and discovered it belonged to an outfit called the Bargain Registry. The young-sounding gentleman on the other end of the phone gave me a long spiel on what the company was about, a lot of which I didn't understand because he spoke in realtorese. It sounded as if it might be worth investigating, however, so I made an appointment for the next day, and took my stepfather, Wim, along for protection.

Enter Gershwin. To this day he has left an indelible impression.

Gershwin was a short, slightly rotund African American man who believed in wearing sweaters and open-necked shirts in a kind of determined we're-all-casual-around-here manner. He was so cheerful, so enthusiastic, so smarmy, and so overconfident, it was unbearable. He also suffered from an incredible overdose of verbal diarrhea. Wim can talk the hind leg off a donkey better than most, but he was as silent as the tomb compared to Gershwin.

For the time we arrived at the appointment at the Bargain Registry to the time we dazedly staggered out of there two hours later, not knowing quite what had hit us, Gershwin talked.

And talked.

And talked some more.

"How are you? Pleased to meet you. And you are? Anastasia and Wim, right?"

"Uh . . ."

"Okay, great, welcome! Now, I understand you're in the market for a house?"

"Yeah, I . . ."

"What sort of a price range are we looking at here? Because we got all price levels."

"I . . ."

"Say you earn thirty thousand. That would qualify you for a seventy-five two-family, or a fifty thousand owner-occupied, at least."

"Oh, uh . . ."

"But that's okay. We have our own mortgage coordinator who comes in and does all the calculatin' for us. Eventually she'll require copies of pay stubs, credit reports, outstanding balances on credit cards, and any other debts you may have, plus assets.

"But as I said, that's all in the future. Of course, we could look at assuming a mortgage as opposed to taking out a new one. That would make a difference, and . . . but if you've never owned a house before . . ."

"No, I . . ."

". . . well, if you haven't, you'd qualify for this federal program for first-time homeowners called . . ."

And so the eager Gershwin continued, gesticulating wildly all the while. He didn't so much as talk to us, but rather at us. We were interested at first in what he had to say, but after twenty minutes of never-ending, fast-paced prattle, our heads were reeling from trying to absorb all of the facts and figures being thrown at us, and from translating realtorese into plain English.

Gershwin seemed to think we knew all about the ins and outs of real estate. We, in fact, knew very little. I know I knew absolutely nothing, and Wim, whose English is fluent and who had actually worked in real estate for a time back in South Africa, foundered by the wayside pretty soon after.

It might not have been so bad if Gershwin hadn't kept wandering off the subject on a tangent and then meandering laboriously back to the point he'd been trying to make, but which we'd lost a few sentences ago. And it might have been less confusing if he'd spoken a teensy bit slower and taken longer breaths between phrases so we could at least have had a chance to break in and ask him to repeat or explain something we hadn't understood right away. And throughout our visit, Gershwin kept smiling that huge, white-toothed grin that split his plump cheeks from ear to ear and caused his shining face to look quite cherubic. I'd never met anyone who could grin like that and talk at the same time, but that smile never wavered for one second.

All in all, we did manage to gather that the Bargain Registry served as a kind of last resort for sellers who had had their houses on the market for a while and were now listing them with the for-the-buyer Bargain Registry at a lower price.

I was put off a little by the news that the buyer, rather than the seller, paid a commission of nine percent, but Gershwin hastened to reassure me that although the Registry would be quite willing to take my money in advance and aggressively look for a house to meet my needs and pocket, they could also look for the house first and be paid once they found it. It was gently implied that without an up-front payment, their search would be slightly less enthusiastic, but being a thrifty person, I couldn't bring myself to part with any of my hard-earned green until I saw results. The commission seemed a little high, but if the Bargain Registry was able to find me a good house at a good price, I was willing to pay it.

I also had fixed ideas about the areas in which I was interested in buying a house. These just happened to be miles away, in the opposite direction of the territory Gershwin normally covered. But did that faze him? Not in the slightest.

"No problemo," he beamed. "I can work with you anywhere, and who knows, maybe I'll still be able to interest you in a property in my part of town - Schemmerhorn."

I would dearly have loved to have looked deep into his glossy, black eyes and said one simple word - "No." Instead, I found myself agreeing to come back another day to meet with the mortgage coordinator to work out how much a bank would risk lending me.

At the end of that first meeting, and feeling rather bemused, Wim and I edged our way out the door and toward our car. Gershwin jubilantly followed us, a spring in his step as he rejoiced in landing himself a new client. After a few blatant hints from me in the form of, "Well, we really must go, supper's on the table," and "Gosh, is that the time?" he reluctantly let us go, and we escaped into the blessed privacy of our car with heartfelt sighs of relief.

As we drove out of the parking lot, I looked back out of the rear window and saw a Cheshire-cat grin bobbing in the gathering dusk of the February twilight. The silence was so sweet, neither Wim nor I said a single word the whole way home.

Incidentally, when I had mentioned to Gershwin that, unlike the Profits of Doom, I did plan on being a landlord, he had immediately enthused, "Great! "Good idea!"

Well, he would, wouldn't he?

CHAPTER ONE: Tenant Horror Stories - Profits of Doom - The Wannabe Landlord

Hi. My name is Anastasia Scuttlebutt and this blog is about the trials and tribulations I went through with my tenants. Are you ready? Here goes . . .

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Suddenly everyone had advice for me, the main trend being, "Don't become a landlord, whatever you do," "Tenants are nothing but trouble," "You'll only regret it," and so on, and so on.

Having led a somewhat sheltered life, I naively considered most people to be basically nice. I couldn't understand why everyone was so negative about my idea of becoming a landlord. But without fail, as soon as I mentioned my impending landlorship, a lip would invariably turn up at the corner in a knowing smirk, followed by the "I wouldn't be a landlord if you paid me" routine.

Funny -- out of all the advice-givers who professed to know so much about the subject, none of them was a landlord. I mean, if I'd met someone who'd actually been a landlord, with a horror story or two to tell from personal experience, it might have made me pause for a moment in my headlong dash to become one. But there again, I'm headstrong and stubborn. Being fixated on my goal, I brushed them off with a, "Yeah, yeah, you had trouble with your tenants, but I won't have tenants like that."

Anyway, what was the problem? What was all the fuss about? How bad could it be? I was a tenant, my parents and friends were tenants, and apart from the occasional blocked toilet, we weren't any problem to our landlords. And so what if I could only afford a house in a poorer neighborhood? The tenants there were just regular people too, right?

Not that I had a lot when I was growing up, either. Born in England, I spend the latter half of my childhood in South Africa, where my parents emigrated to start their own trade-show (exhibition) business. I was eleven years old, tall, skinny, pale-skinned, and shy. My five-year-old sister, Frederica, was the complete opposite. Outgoing and vivacious, she tanned easily, was never at a loss for words, and was a constant show-off, even when no one else was in the room. Oh, how I envied her self-confidence and her ability to stand on the knuckles of her toes. Alas, I was born the most un-supple child in creation, much to the frustration of various gym and ballet teachers throughout my childhood. Frederica also inherited both of our parents' talent for art, singing, and acting, whereas I had only managed to inherit an offshoot of the creative gene by being kind-of good at writing.

Divorced from my moody father a year after we arrived in South Africa, my young, attractive mum married a six-foot-four, skinny, red-headed Dutchman named Wim (W-uh-m). Wim was full of fun and loved the outdoors -- though I wasn't too keen on his passion for fishing because I felt sorry for the fish. He also loved me and Frederica as if we were his own. He cheerfully got up with us in the middle of the night to look for meteors, paid us a penny per garden snail -- which nearly bankrupted him when we collected buckets full -- and had Frederica running around the back yard (garden) with a container of salt, trying to sprinkle some on a bird's tail so it would let her catch it. Good with his hands, Wim was the one who built us a treehouse and made me a pair of stilts when my old ones wore out from constant use.

At first Wim worked with my dad, building exhibition stands, but he soon launched his own stand-fitting business. Although it would later become the largest stand-fitting company in South Africa, building up the business took time, effort, and expense. Frederica and I never lacked for anything, but during a learning-how-to-cook phase, I soon learned how to make a chicken last for three meals.

When I met British-born Albert, he was in his final year of medical school and hankering to move to the United States, having served a successful internship there. Soon after I married Albert at the tender age of nineteen, we moved to England and worked our way slowly through the U.S. emigration process. During this time, Albert worked as a psychiatry resident (houseman) at a country institution, and our daughters, Andrea and Bronwyn, were born a year apart. Although we lived in an apartment on the edge of the rambling, old mental hospital, salaries for housemen were pitiful, and I became quite adept at bouncing checks.

Three years later, we finally made it across the Atlantic, but salaries for psych residents in the States were not much better; no more bounced checks, thank goodness, but money was tight. Things grew still more tight after we divorced a year later.

Forced to return to work, I found a babysitter and got a job working as a dental claims rep at an insurance company.

I hated it.

I then tried my hand at selling advertising, but being still painfully shy, I hated that job even more, though I quite enjoyed the attention I received from many of my male customers. I actually received a couple of offers from married men to engage in some nooky at a nearby motel, which I declined.

The girls and I lived in a subsidized apartment complex. Although our apartment was huge, I didn't much like living there. The upstairs neighbors had two young children who delighted in racing up and down the entire length of their uncarpeted apartment, dropping heavy toys and moving furniture around at six o'clock in the morning.

Andrea and Bronwyn, on the other hand, loved it, and their social lives improved tremendously. Many children lived in the apartment complex, which was surrounded by playgrounds, plenty of grass for ball games, trees for climbing, and long, interconnecting paths for safe bike-riding. At the end of the day, mothers would stand at the back doors of the apartment buildings, yelling out their kids' names. Panting children, invariably grubby, but happy, would appear from all corners to be gathered inside for their supper, and silence would settle over the neighborhood with the approaching dusk.

Being subsidized housing, we also had a kind of unofficial single mothers' club going, useful for babysitting and sticking Bandaids on each others' children's scrapes, whichever mother's building was closest to the accident scene. Life also perked up for me, as I had started dating a man called Jim, who owned a hot tub and engaged in interesting hobbies like ham radio and flying model airplaines.

Meanwhile, life as a dental claims rep was not very lucrative. I was now thirty-one years old. It was time to better myself.

I took a couple of night classes at a local college, with a view toward embarking on a nursing career. But then Andrea slammed her finger in the louver doors of her bedroom closet, angry at being told to clean her room. As I watched the doctor maneuvering the bone back through Andrea's fingernail and stitching up the red, pulpy mess, I managed to reassure my daughter that the doctor was still waiting for the anesthetic to take effect, while my stomach let me know in no uncertain terms that I was way too squeamish to be a nurse.

I began scrutinizing the Sunday papers and noticed that the legal field offered pretty decent salaries. I began imagining myself as a kind of Perry Mason-type of legal assistant, helping wily attorneys solve interesting crimes and celebrating courtroom victories. By this time, my mother and Wim had immigrated to the United States so they could witness their grandchildren growing up. Regretfully, Frederica had to stay behind because of immigration laws. Although she had been ill for a long time with liver disease, she was holding her own, ran her own screenprinting business, and was involved in amateur theatre with Daddy, who was by now on to his fourth wife.

I found myself a half-day data-entry job so I could spend time with the girls in the afternoons after school, and Mummy babysat while I attended night school three nights a week. Nine months and one paralegal certificate later, I clawed my way into the first job that I interviewed for and settled down to a steady pay-check and a growing savings account.

In a couple of years, I had amassed enough money for a downpayment, and interest rates were low. Now was the time to buy a house, venture into the world of landlording, and hopefully earn some extra money. Visions of sugarplums emblazoned with dollar signs danced in my head at the idea of tenants paying me monthly rent that would amount to more than the mortgage payments. Whether I lived on the top floor of a two-family house -- no more living underneath people, thank you very much -- and rented out the bottom floor, or lived elsewhere, collecting rent from two sets of tenants, my bank balance should grow steadily. I was already imagining how I would spend all that money. Maybe I would even get rich. The sky was the limit.

By this time, I had been dating Jim for nearly five years -- madly infatuated the first year, simmering gently the next two, and then slowly declining. I hadn't felt able to break it off because of hurting Jim's feelings, especially as his ardor had been increasing whilst mine was cooling. It was quite a relief when we finally broke up after one fight too many.

The hunt for a house began . . . . . . .