Four properties in 2 years

Property number 4 is in the bag. Our friends are joking that they'll have to name the street after us as like a domino effect we just keep buying the next house over the fence.

No.4 is going to be our biggest challenge so far. There are several 'problems' with it:

1. Residual title. A friendly valuer I sought advice from said he'd never recommend buying a property that's still sitting on a residual title (i.e. clear title for the section hasn't been completed).
2. Abandoned unfinished 2 bedroom cottage. Twenty years ago the previous owner attempted to build his last home - a 2 bedroom Skyline cottage. He got as far as insulating the walls and doing some pretty shoddy lining; failed the consent and became ill never to recover enough to continue.
3. The rubbish. Bless his heart the old guy collected a sh...load of second hand building materials and concrete blocks, reinforcing steel, fittings... the house is as full of crap as the yard. Plus, over the last ten years since his death the neighbours on 2 sides have pitched whatever they could over the fence.
4. Nature. There are numerous letters of complaint on file complaining about the overgrown unsightly section and the rats.
5. No drive. We've got heaps of drive but there isn't one to drive down to get to the section. The people in front have turned it into lawn.
6. It's a crosslease. Anything we want to do will have to be approved by the owners of the front half of the section.

So, why'd we buy it? We think it was a reasonable price, for a section that already had services (drainage and power) laid to the house site - it's a right-of-way section so that represents a considerable saving. There's an existing building consent, so the development contribution (which cost us about $25,000 for House No.1) has been paid. It's adjacent to House No.3 and overlooked by House No.2 so any improvement we make will lift the value or at least standard of living of 2 of our other rentals. We need to replace the fence between House No.3 and this new one anyway, so at least 2 of our properties will benefit from that. Our tenant over the fence will keep an eye on it while it's under 'construction.'

We don't know what we're going to do with it yet and we don't know how badly it'll hurt us financially. It'll take a while to find out, because after 2 years of working almost every weekend and nearly every day of any annual leave we get, we realise we can't maintain such a gruelling schedule. Property No.4 is going to stay looking abandoned for a few more weeks at least.