We haven’t added an Airbnb to this property yet, although we’re still considering ideas.
Here’s some of what we’ve been working on in the last 6 months:
- We recently submitted a protest for our property taxes this year which I encourage people to do each year. Initially when I protested, they didn’t offer me any reduction in value. As a result, I appealed to the board. While waiting on hold for a board hearing, another appraiser jumped on the call and was ready to negotiate. They initially offered $42,000 off the current assessed value. I negotiated them to $59,000 off. This resulted in a tax assessed value even less than the one from last year. I was pumped!
- We’ve done some updating to our home & we believe the value has gone up significantly. We’re just over 2 years in, so we’re able to flip for tax free profit if we want, but we think we’re going to hold on for a bit longer.
- We have a pretty large lot and the watering costs each year are really high. We’ve slowly been replacing some of our water-dependent landscaping with less water-dependent landscaping. We were able to cap 10 sprinkler heads a few weeks ago & may be able to do more soon. This should help with the ongoing cost.
- We’ve automated our thermostats to reduce our electric/gas bill. We have multiple zones & we’re trying to get better at letting the automation do the work without our interference.
Since we’ve missed having a detached structure we can monetize with Airbnb, we’ve just planned for one retail real estate transaction each year to cover our basic housing expenses. I’ll talk about that more in the Agent Hacking recap.
House Hacking continues to be a great way to earn extra income & reduce your housing costs to nearly $0.
