Joys of home ownership

I bought my Tucson home in November 2006, then promptly moved to Seattle. I rented it to a steady stream of intertwined people through May 2013 at which point they left and the house was vacant for the first time. I was busy with other stuff so I lapsed a bit on showing it and getting it ready. That's when the fun began.

1. A burglar! I got a call one morning that someone had hopped the back fence and started hacking off copper piping from the yard. Ugh. Seriously, this is like the meth-head moment of the day. The mount of copper taken might net $10-20 in scrap. Of course it caused hundreds of dollars of damage to my house (and also to the water bill). And to prove his brilliance, the guy came back a few days later to finish the job. The neighbor saw him, called the cops, and hopefully he's now in jail.

2. After getting the burglar damage fixed up, I called in a property manager to handle the house. She told me there were a large number of issues with showing the house. It wasn't really clean, there was a broken window, there were a number of other issues and so on. She wasn't willing to handle coordinating all this, so I had to ask my dad to help. Bit by bit, we got the big stuff handled, but that ate up most of July.

3. I called her back to let her know we'd gotten it in pretty good shape. She checked back, confirmed this, then told me that she couldn't represent the house because she'd noticed a bow in the floor. She hypothesized that it was a tree root pressing up against the laundry room. While in town I looked, and it was pretty obvious that there really is an issue. So, now I need to have my dad go back and babysit yet another contractor and hope there's not a huge cost associated with this. Ugh.

In short, I've spent the last 2.5 months not getting the house rented out.

Updates:

4. Finally tracked down a new property manager. I talked with them on Monday (Aug 19). They then took over the keys from the previous person, checked out the house, noted some issues and sent me a pile of paperwork to sign. This is as much as we've accomplished in 6 days. No concrete work list yet. No concrete dollar amounts yet.