I just thought I'd give a quick update on what I've been up to. I arrived back from Florida just over 3 months ago and have been trying to find the time to write this update, but haven't managed to find time until now!

I spent about 4 weeks in Florida, most of the time in Jacksonville. A little time in Gaynesville, Miami, Captiva Island and of course Orlando (to keep the kids happy). Unfortunately i didn't get to spend time in Cape Coral / Fort Myers where I was hoping to have a look around and meet Cheeves. Maybe next time?

Anyway, after almost going crazy trying to work out what was the best thing for me to do – what type of property to buy, where to buy, even – should I buy? I decided that I had to take the plunge, otherwise I'd be back in Melbourne and the whole project would just end up in the "too hard" basket, like it did 6 years ago after my trip to Texas.

We eventually bought a property in a lower priced area of Jacksonville – not a war zone, but certainly not the best part of town. It seems to be a lower working class type area. It's on the north western part of town. We came across a bloke who was looking to sell one of his properties, so decided to buy it from him. It's a 2 bedroom weatherboard, built about 1950 I think, that was recently re-habbed. We paid $34,900 for it and has a tenant in there paying $650 per month, so just over 22% gross return. We had a plumbers bill in the first month for $60 for a blocked drain, which seems to be a common problem in the US for older houses – apparently the old drains are smaller than they need to be and are built from some cement fibre type material that is prone to tree roots growing into them. We've been told to update the drain would be about $500, so that's an option if it keeps causing problems. So, at the moment everything seems to be going along okay.

We tried to open a bank account over there and were unable to do it. I'm not sure how other people have done it because we were told by two banks that we needed social security numbers, or evidence of a permanent address in the US, or a work visa, or something similar. So we are now having our property manager pay the rent into our Paypal account, then transferring that to our bank account. It seems to work well. I don't know if there is a better way of doing it, but that's what we've got at the moment.

We bought the property in a Land Trust, which seemed like a much easier and cheaper option than an LLC and seems to offer some asset protection as well. But I think an LLC would be good, then it could be linked to our Australian Family Trust and then the income (and future capital gain, if any) could be offset against other properties in the Trust. Anyway, that all needs looking into a bit more in the future. I'm still not sure how to go about doing all that or what costs are involved.

So, that's about it for the moment. Any comments, help, criticisms are most welcome. A sincere thanks to you all for your earlier replies to my posts and for showing an interest in what I was doing and for the advice that was given.

Phil

Sooo just had lengthy conversation with plumber number two.

 Definitely is a hot water leak and he said that it is leaking at around 1L per 10s. Said that he may have been able to detect a hot spot if the water was still running but as there is a valve that the  plumber installed yesterday to enable the tenants to shut off the water in between showers it isn't obvious now.

There are two options he has given:

1. Turn the hot tap on for two to three hours to hopefully find the hot spot which could take up to two hours. Then isolate and fix with worst. Ase scenario around a days work at approx $1000 and the need to use a cement drill which also sprays water inside or

2. Reroute at ball park $5000 – $8000 with proper quote to come. Labour around two days.

Better than yesterday. What would you do?

Cheers