Rehabbing (almost) New Construction

It’s been another productive week and a half. We put 3 more houses under contract to purchase; one short sale, one REO, and one estate property. That’s a pretty good mix of deals.

I’ve found that if we want to be consistently buying properties we need to have multiple channels to source new deals. What I mean by that is we don’t rely on just one thing to bring us deals, we have alot of lines in the water. Most new investors start off and work just one lead source, and when that doesn’t pan out right away they get frustrated. If you want to be consistently doing deals you need alot of leads. In order to get alot of leads you need to have multiple channels to fill your pipeline.

Well OK, on to one of our latest deals:

We bought a really nice contemporary ranch a few weeks back that is almost brand new. We got the inside scoop on this deal because we know one of the board of directors at the local bank that foreclosed on it. We actually bought an estate property from her; she represented the estate as the Executrix. She liked the way we did business and recommended that the bank work with us on their foreclosures. We ended up purchasing this house directly from the bank after they took it back at auction. The bank didn’t want to list the house with a realtor and didn’t want to evict the occupants, they just wanted it sold and off their books and they were willing to give it to us at a good price.

We made an agreement with the bank and immediately approached the occupants and offered them a good sum of money to move. We figured if all the big banks were doing “Cash for Keys” why couldn’t we. Our biggest concern was not having to go through an eviction. In MA evictions can drag out for 6 months or more, and this would have cost us alot in time and money. Well, with the money we were offering them they probably felt like they were winning the lottery, so they agreed to be out in 3 weeks.

Two and a half weeks later they were out and this is what we got:

Modern Ranch

Kitchen 1

Kitchen 2

Dining Area

Living Room

Master Bathroom

Bathroom 2

Bathroom 2

Basement

You can see that even though the house was completed in 2009, there is still some work that needs to be done. We plan on painting the whole interior, doing some new hardwoods, installing a new kitchen countertop and backsplash, upgrading both bathrooms, and possibly adding central A/C.

This should be a quick/easy job and we may even already have a buyer lined up for it!!

Comments

  1. You got very lucky–they didn’t steal very much–usually builders steal a lot of stuff because they can.

    Look at this property:

    http://www.redfin.com/MA/Weston/277-North-Ave-02493/home/11438916

    Amazing how much people take…

  2. Nice! So the house was completed in 2009, and the bank has already foreclosed on it? Didn’t take very long … that’s unfortunate … oh well, one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity.

  3. Doing new hardwoods Matt? Is the current hardwoods poor quality? Or is that laminate? Can’t quite tell from the pictures …

    • Hi Zac,

      It’s a low quality laminate that shouldn’t be in a brand new house like this one. So we plan on taking it up and putting in real hardwoods…. however this new buyer we are working with may want to keep them…. so we’ll see.

  4. Hi Matt,

    We have the inside track with this bank because we know someone that sits on the Board of Directors. I forgot about that part and just added it into the post.

    Thanks for the comments!

  5. Quick and easy indeed…this is like, a near-nothing job.

    Nicely done. How’d you find that this bank bought it?

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