Chapter 97: Leasing Your Own House

Tuesday, March 13, 1984

We headed back to The Kettle today. Close, cheap, and tasty made for an easy choice. The town was mostly deserted, so we had plenty of choices, and we’d probably make different ones over the week, but this worked fine for today.

We headed over to the house afterward. Maxine had set up visits from a number of contractors that she thought were likely candidates. We also got the estimates back from Paul Finley, ranging from a low of under one thousand to a high of three thousand. I suspected that, in the end, we’d go with the most ambitious plan.

Paul said that he’d pulled the plans from the city and spoken to one of their sewer engineers. The house drain would almost certainly be adequate for basement plumbing. He wasn’t completely sure, but it gave us more confidence in the plan. To be sure, he’d have to work with a plumber to get a measurement, but the plans also indicated that the sewer line exited the house through the support column.

We had four general contractors out today. One of them I really didn’t like. One of them Angie really didn’t like. Neither of them was particularly liked by anyone else, so that was easy. We’d have to look more deeply into the remaining two. Both of them worked with electricians, plumbers, architects, and whatever else they needed. One was almost certainly less expensive than the other. If they did quality work, we’d probably go with the less expensive option, but we were willing to pay for quality.

Lunch was sandwiches from Gideon’s Farmer’s Market, courtesy of Angie driving over there. For dinner, we headed back to the Dixie Chicken. Whether by luck, or because she did work there, and wasn’t a student who’d left town, we spotted our waitress from before and asked for her. She actually remembered us, too!

We thanked her for pointing us to Maxine, and let her know we’d bought a house not far from here. She, in turn, teased us about having forgotten to card us. She didn’t card us this time, either. Since we weren’t ordering alcohol, all we’d done was violate their rules, and I doubted they made a habit of throwing out well-behaved freshmen just for being a tad young.

After dinner, the girls suggested that we drive around and get a look at things at night. I had no problem with that, so we spent a couple of hours sightseeing, trying to further get our bearings and learn where things were. It was easy to get around with so many students gone, and that perhaps made it easier to get a feel for what was where. I didn’t have to worry about bothering other drivers, and we didn’t have to try to look through, or over, other cars.

We got back to the hotel around nine and called Carole. I thought it might have been a bit late, but Jas assured me Carole would be up and that her parents wouldn’t care if the phone rang. We got her, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. After that, we hung out for a bit, then went to bed, this time just to sleep.

Tomorrow we’d be here all day, but Thursday we might head over to Austin. That would necessitate another call to Michael. If he wasn’t available, we’d do something else, or just head home.

Wednesday, March 14, 1984

We spent most of the day at three paint stores, two flooring stores, two hardware stores, and four appliance stores.

Most of it was looking at paint, flooring, and wallpaper, obviously. The girls had mostly converged on some form of off-white downstairs, but exactly what shade had everyone thinking (and rethinking). Jas said she wanted a particular shade of lavender for our bedroom and I agreed, which threw her for a loop. Apparently, it’d been an attempt to tease me. I’d have been fine with it, honestly. Her real picks were either some sort of yellow or possibly a pale blue.

Meanwhile, Angie and Paige actually were looking at different shades of lavender. And, for the trim, they’d started with white but were now considering maroon, since it matched with A&M. Jasmine decided she’d have to think about maroon trim, too.

The wallpaper search was complicated, and I don’t think we actually got anywhere with it. The girls were all too divided. A few of the patterns that were on their list were ones I didn’t particularly like (and said so), but could live with (and I said that, too).

There was an amusing part, though. I actually spotted three of the wallpaper patterns used in the house my ex-wife and I had lived in. It wasn’t exactly hard to remember, considering I’d lived with those patterns for twenty-five years or so.

When I pointed them out, the girls agreed that, yes, I could probably put up with anything at all. It was a relief that none of them liked those patterns, anyway.

The green in one of them caught Jasmine’s eye, though. She was considering it as an option for our bathroom. It was a perfectly nice green — the wallpaper had been ruined by the enormous gaudy flowers, not the green background.

We continued to have the same opinions on appliances: stainless steel was preferred, but black was also good. We decided to reject anything else and focus on those. Quality was more important than features, but we wanted features, too. We were looking at replacing at least the range/oven, refrigerator, and dishwasher. I suspected that we’d replace the disposal and the cabinet hardware, too. The cabinets themselves looked to be real wood and well-made, but the hardware was failing in places, especially the hinges.

In the afternoon, we paid Aggieland Property Management a visit. They were the property manager Maxine liked the most.

Or, perhaps, disliked the least — it was somewhat hard to tell. She didn’t really like any of the property management companies all that much.

I tended to agree with her. I’d had much better luck working directly with landlords, or apartment complexes, than I ever had with property management companies. Still, we needed one, at least for now.

The owner was a short, middle-aged man named Terry Grayson. He shook our hands, then sat down.

“I’m glad that Maxine Fletcher called me,” he said, “or I’d think this was some sort of a joke. I’m still not completely convinced that it’s not a practical joke, though the recent sale of the property does have me a bit more convinced, even if it’s to an LLC.”

“We’re on the level,” I said. “I’d say no games, but we’re definitely playing something of a game.”

“I don’t follow. Maxine said it would all make sense, though,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “Here’s the situation. We all find ourselves with scholarships that will pay a reasonable price for lodging. Now, the university would undoubtedly not want to pay that for someone living in their own house. But, then, it’s MNM Investments’ house, isn’t it? And MNM Investments, being an investment company, wouldn’t want anyone just living there for free, now would it? But it knows nothing about property management.”

He chuckled. Loudly!

“So, you’re renting your own house, basically. I like it! And you need me to make it look legit.”

“That’s exactly right,” Angie said, grinning. “We know that it’s slightly underhanded, but we really don’t think it’s all that underhanded. The university would be fine simply paying that money to landlords. It would be fine if we had a rent-to-own arrangement. It seems silly to force us not to own the house, so we needed a workaround.”

I said, “We need everyone at Aggieland Property Management to either think it’s a normal rental or to pretend that it is. Obviously, we’d want to pay a significantly lower fee for this, but you’re doing literally no work, since any service calls we make will get passed on to the owner, who will delegate MNM’s people to handle the issue.”

He chuckled again. “It’s free money for me, pretty much. Maxine said this wasn’t all of it?”

“We have some money to invest, and we’ll have more with rent coming in. We may well come into another property or two that will actually need a property manager.”

He nodded. “Somehow I believe you on that. It makes good sense. I’ve just never seen undergraduates planning to be landlords before!”

Jas smiled. “I’ll be the contact, for now. I’m the manager of MNM Investments, though, of course, that’s not public knowledge.”

She gave Terry a wink, to which he smiled.

“Of course,” he said. “If you’d like, I can get our standard contract and amend it with the changes to limit service and correspondingly limit fees.”

“We’ll want our lawyer to look over it,” Jasmine said.

He chuckled. “Wise of you. I think it’ll pass muster, but I’d never sign anything my lawyer hadn’t checked, unless it was just minor amendments like this.”

“You’ve got a fax?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“Then we should be able to do this without driving back up here, right?” I said.

“Yeah. We do that all of the time, really. Great invention! You can mail a check, or we take credit card payments. We’ll charge a small initial setup fee, and then it’ll be ... one percent?”

We all looked at each other.

“We can live with one percent,” Angie said.

“For anything that actually involved students, we’d charge five to eight percent, depending on the property, how selective you are with tenants, and so forth,” he said.

“Makes sense,” Paige said. “Let’s say it’s the house MNM owns. What would you charge there?”

He bit his lip. “I’d have to see it, but assuming it was fixed up and in good shape ... that neighborhood, and restricting it to the sort of quieter, usually older kids that rent there ... um, that’d be five percent. They’re really unlikely to give us a lot of grief. If you’ve seen some of the tri-plexes down south...”

We all nodded.

“Those are eight percent. Maybe even more. I mean, if we even took them on. They don’t rent for all that much, the tenants usually think we’re responsible for more than we are, they gripe and complain and call us out for things we don’t fix, they knock holes in the walls and kill the grass and...”

He stopped, shook his head, then said, “We’d probably take one on for someone we were working with, but just speaking as a friend, don’t buy one of those. Even if you make money — and you’ll probably make money — it’s just not worth the hassle.”

“Thanks,” Paige said. “I appreciate it.”

“We all do,” Angie said, smiling.

“So, what do you need? I mean, signed contract, but...” Jasmine said.

Terry smiled. “We’ll need the dates. I assume August to May, renewing in May for a year. You won’t get stipends before August, so you won’t need management. For the next summer, though, you’d theoretically need to pay rent. It seems dumb to charge you one percent of your own money, though, so we can waive the fee for the summer months only. My accountant will have a conniption, but I can explain it in vague terms.”