Great forum, I'm glad I found it! I have some general questions, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

I have a duplex in south Florida I am considering selling within the next year. The situation I am in is odd. I seem to have alot of equity in the house. My mortgage balance is ~73K and I have been told the ballpark market value is 220K - 280K. The duplex is in sound, but could use some updating and repairs. The biggest issue is it will need a new roof soon, which will be costly. I'd guess the condition would put in somewhere near the lower end of the estimate, maybe ~240K.

Here's my problem. While I am now making fairly a decent income, I wasn't 4 years ago and had accumulated alot of dept. I am using a credit consolidation to pay off all old dept, with normal payments due for the next 18 months. This takes up a good chunck of my income and makes major repairs hard to tackle. I can't seem to get a second mortgage with my credit history, which seems ludicrous considering how much equity is in the property.

Oh well, here are my questions.
1) When I sell the duplex considering it's 50% income property and 50% my primary residence, will I have to pay capital gains tax on half of the sale amount?
2) Are there any lenders who will loan money based soley on the equity in this property? I mean who will not touch the credit reports.
3) Should I even consider at all selling in current condition? The roof doesn't leak but did need patched a year ago. The appliances are old, restrooms and kitchens could use modernising. Etc. What I'm thinking is an investment of ~10K should increase the value from ~240K to ~280K. Is that realistic?

That's good enough for now. Thank you for your time.

Welcome to the forum. I sent you a PM.

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The tax issue is pretty straight forward. You will pay taxes on 50% of the gain as that part was rental. Any improvements that you are depreciating and expenses related to the sale will reduce the taxable amount. If any repairs are needed to the rental side you can lower the taxable amount on a dollar for dollar basis to what is spent. So if you do any interior improvements make them on the rental side as it will lower your taxe bill.

Unless your credit is completely messed up you should be able to get a small loan, but the problem is many lenders don't even like to play around with anything under 100k when they have other business they can work on. This just means you need to do more research to find a lender not that it can't be done.

Repairs are unique to the area as to if they are worth while. No matter what though if you don't have the cash then it doesn't matter.

A more important question is should you sell? If you can't refi then you probably can't purchase. So if you wanted to sell and then move into something else you may be stuck renting until your credit is cleaned up. Why not just stay there for the next 18 months and pay off all your debt and grow more equity?
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