Chapter 81: Staying Connected

Sunday, January 22, 1984

Just to be different, we headed to an IHOP (or possibly the IHOP — I wasn’t sure if there were two in town or not). In some ways not as good as The Kettle, but in some ways better. We’d probably go to each of them from time to time.

Once we’d finished, we headed over to Maxine’s office. She was there, and not busy, so we settled back into the same seats we’d used yesterday.

Everyone looked at me, so I said, “We’re seriously interested. I’m sure you’ll probably want a bit more assurance that we’ve actually got cash on hand than just my say-so, and even Kyle’s...”

She smiled, and nodded.

“I have a copy of my, and Angie’s, most recent bank statements. It’d be hard to forge them, but obviously possible. If you’d like to phone the bank, we’ll figure out some way to do that.”

“The statements should be sufficient for now. You only need to convince me to spend time on this, and that’s already done, pretty much,” she said, smiling. “The seller is the one that’ll really need convincing, not me. But that will probably come in the form of earnest money when we get to serious negotiation. Most of the time they’ll want to see that you can get a mortgage, but you clearly can’t, so they’ll need something else.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

I took out copies of our bank statements and passed them over.

Maxine looked, then smiled and said, “I get that both of these have stories, and I’m sorry if they’re sad stories, but you’re in an enviable financial position even if you were twice your age.”

“Thanks,” Angie said. “Mine is the sad story, and Daddy Frank would be happy that it’s going to a good use.”

Maxine smiled again, then said, “I’ll start talking with the sellers. I can note that you will likely not be able to close until mid-February. They’ll be happy to have an interested buyer at all! As I said, if someone else enters the picture, I fully expect they’ll try to get a bidding war started, not take the first offer that meets their low price. That’s especially true if we already have our foot in the door. Most realtors really don’t want to stab other realtors in the back that way. We have to work with each other, after all.”

“Makes sense,” I said, nodding. “How does this work with the house already having tenants?”

“By far the easiest way to handle things will be to simply transfer the contract with the property management company to you. I mean, really, it’s a new contract, but that’s just the old one redrawn. That way the tenants aren’t disrupted at all. They have a lease that runs until the end of May. That means, of course, that you’ll only have limited access to the house until then. You need to give them notice ahead of time and so forth.”

“I don’t think we’ll need to get in there that often,” I said, with the others nodding.

“That’ll partly depend on the home inspection. There could be something wrong that needs earlier attention. For instance, and as an extreme case, suppose the flooring is weak somewhere on the second floor. The current owner would be obligated to fix it if discovered, but we’re assuming they don’t know. You’d have to get someone to fix it, because you’d be liable for a known safety hazard otherwise.”

I nodded. “That makes sense.”

“Of course, something like that is either a red flag on the purchase or will knock thousands off the price. I’m not expecting anything like that, but...” she said, shrugging a bit, “ ... it’s hardly new, it’s been rented to college students for years, and so forth. Who’s to say that some idiot didn’t flood a bathtub twenty times, each time weakening the floorboards?”

“Lack of water damage on the ceiling,” Paige said, grinning. “I might have seen that happen.”

“Unless they replaced the ceiling but ignored the boards,” Maxine said. “Though you have a point. If they’d replaced the ceiling and didn’t check the flooring, the negligence would be on their part.”

“I get what you mean, though,” Paige said. “Hidden or not, we need to fix anything that would be a liability issue.”

“Or if it’ll just get worse,” Angie said. “If it’s a little tiny water pipe leak now, we’d need to fix it, because months of water leaking would be bad, and the leak might grow.”

“Yeah,” Maxine said. “That’s almost unrelated to the tenants. You can do any necessary maintenance.”

“Who’s the property management company?” I said.

Maxine nodded. “A1 Brazos Property Management. I’m not their biggest fan, but they’re...”

She paused, shrugged, then said, “They’re fine, and you’ll be fine contracting with them. As of June 1st, they’re out of the picture, the tenants are out of the picture, and you’re free to get busy redecorating.”

“I think that’s all we need for now. You’ve got all of our contact information, correct?”

“I do,” she said.

“Be on the lookout for anything similar,” I said. “Distressed properties that need work, but not too much work, that we could reasonably turn into rentals. This one is absolutely the priority, but we’re on the lookout.”

She nodded. “The same problems with financing apply.”

“I know. It may not be right away, but we’re ... ambitious.”

“I can see that!”

We parted with handshakes, promising to talk soon. We stopped for fast food around Cypress-Fairbanks, then headed to Gene’s, with a brief stop at the Walgreen’s near Memorial to drop off the cameras for developing.

Study Group was all work this week. Next week was an exam week, the first of our last six. In some ways it got easier from here, and in others it got harder.

No one wanted to blow their four-year average on some senior-year stupidity, but the signs were everywhere that people were starting to disengage from high school, especially for those who’d reached the magical age of eighteen.

One of the pieces of that, college, started to fall into place just a bit. Connie and Jimmy had both received acceptance letters from Yale, including what sounded to me like a quite generous financial aid package. They both intended to accept, which was hardly a surprise. Two of us set, and to a top-tier university.

Sue, Gene, Amit, and Sheila were all applying in the Northeast, and I think knowing that letters might be in the mail just made the waiting harder for them.

At least Amit and Sheila had a distraction. It was Sheila’s birthday, and Amit had brought a red velvet cake with eighteen candles on it. Sheila was all smiles as she blew out the candles and all smiles after their nap.

The cake was good, too.

Unless my memory failed me, the next Study Group birthday would be a very big one. My ‘older woman’, and hopefully future wife, would be turning eighteen in just a few short weeks.

Unlike most couples (Angie and Paige being the only exception I was aware of), we would always be able to argue (playfully!) over which of us was really older. That might be fun.

We ended Study Group early because most of us wanted to watch the Super Bowl with our families. I did, too, partly for reasons of déjà vu.

This was, after all, the year with perhaps the most famous Super Bowl commercial in history: Apple’s ‘1984’ commercial. As much as my relationship with Apple was likely to be ‘user’ for a while, and then ‘investor’ much later, I was sentimentally attached to them and their products. It would take Microsoft a long time to start to catch up to the usability of Macs, and they’d never really totally gotten there. Microsoft had their own advantages (Apple had never come up with data-center versions of their operating system, for instance), but for end users, there were real advantages to Macs.

I’d probably wait a couple of years until the Macintosh II came out, though. There were far too many advantages of the bigger, larger system over the original ‘toaster’ product. However, if we got to the point where money really was no issue, what was to stop us from having a Mac early on? It’d certainly be better for writing papers and creating reports than an Apple II or a PC.

With all of the apologies in the world to Michael, I’d be an investor in his company, but it might be a long time before I used his products except for show.

Before the commercial, we talked over the game, telling Dad and Mom about the house. Angie showed off some of her pictures (leaving out ones where we were most likely to remodel). We told them that it was a rent-to-own arrangement and that, with four years of paying rent, we’d likely build some significant equity in the house.

Dad had to think about it. He would normally be slightly opposed to that, I think, but not in a college setting. Honestly, the worst we would do is walk away from it with no equity, which would leave us exactly where we would’ve been if we’d rented. On the other hand, we could potentially make quite a lot of money if the housing market did the right thing.

Overall, he was in favor, as long as it was a nice place to live. I know that he and Mom might have preferred that we live in the dorms, all things being equal, but all things were definitely not equal, and they’d known for a long time we would never live in the dorms.

The house pretty much went over as a success and got our cover story firmly established. Now we just had to live up to it. If the sale fell through, we’d simply say that they’d decided to rent the house to someone else. We’d thought about waiting to tell them until we’d bought it, but that would make the whole thing that much more complicated.