Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Oleatha (Acquired september, 2020)
This pretty gal was named by the wife of the real estate developer who built the area. She named it after herself and then Marquette after her children’s school. She’d grown up on Delmar and reversed the syllables to name Mardel. Delmar had been named by two landowners, one from Delaware (Del), the other from Maryland (Mar). So that’s fun.
For the past year I lived in this top left unit, again so that I could acquire it with FHA owner-occupancy at 3.5% down. After a failed sloppy seller-financed attempt, I purchased this at a bit of (what I thought was) a premium at $360,000. I redid some bathrooms here and patched some damaged walls there, and refinanced into a conventional loan this past summer. It's now valued at $450,000.
As with these first two properties, once you get rid of the FHA you can go grab another one, which is how we get to miss Lindenwood.