How to Improve Your Investment Property Without Spending a lot of Money

I have owned a number of rental properties of which I did 99% of the work myself. That alone will save you a ton of money, however here are some more money saving steps you can use.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Do the work yourself. I touched on this in the introduction. You will thousands of dollars when you do the work yourself and rentals are a great way to teach yourself handyman skills. Making a mistake in rental is a lot easier to take then doing it in your own home.

2. Skip the ceramic floors and go with one piece linoleum. Today's linoleum floors look better than ever and the best part is they are so cheap. There is no need to go with an expensive tile in your kitchen and bathrooms when you can cut your costs by more than 75% when using a one piece linoleum.

3. Go with the scratch and dent appliances. In our area it is required to supply a stove/oven and fridge. For this reason I got to know my local scratch and dent appliance shop. There you can get good quality appliances at nearly 90% off (depending on the make and model) the list price. The more dented and scratched it looks the more you usually get off.

4. Look to Craigslist. Craigslist has a category called "free". In there you will find a lot freebies that people are just dieing to get rid of. I have seen anything from furniture to sink fixtures, recessed lights, you name it. A friend of mine was actually able to snag some kitchen cabinets that he put in his garage. Apparently the homeowners were remodeling their kitchen and were just going to throw them away. There is no better price than FREE!

5. Look to the discount paint rack at Home Depot or Lowes. God's honest true story, I painted the entire inside of one of my rentals for a total of $13.00! Yes that is thirteen dollars. Home Depot and Lowes resell paint that customers bring back, these are labeled mistints. Usually a one gallon can is about $5.00 and quarts are $1.00. When they start to get overloaded with paint they reduce it even further by as much as 50%. What I did was take all the flat paints and mix them together in 5 gallon buckets. The color was an interesting shade of beige. Will I ever be able to match this color again? Nope, but to paint the house for $13.00, it was well worth it.

Resources

• Craigslist
• Recieve all of my How to articles via email by clicking here

[MsCecily]

on 8/5/2008 I'll give these tips a try.