REO Rehab Complete – 53 Fullerton St Finished and Staged

We are working overtime trying to finish up a couple properties in order to beat the first time buyer tax credit deadline. I’m hoping their are lots of last minute shoppers out there who will be out looking for a new home over the next 7 days.

First up on the list is 53 Fullerton St. This was our first ever MLS/REO purchase. It seems hard to believe that over the last couple years, with all the deals we have done, we had never bought off the MLS. I was trained as an investor to market for deals and work directly with sellers…. this is our preferred method of doing deals as there is usually no competition and better deals can be made. However, with the flood of foreclosures, I couldn’t ignore the REO’s anymore. You have to be aggressive, and quick with your offers when working REO’s. It’s true that the well priced ones will go very fast, usually with multiple offers. So there’s always competition, which will limit your profit potential, but good deals can be had. As a matter of fact, we bought two REO’s last week and got an offer accepted on a third!

OK, back to Fullerton St. We did new siding, new windows, a new kitchen, 2 new full baths, new electric, new plumbing, a new boiler and a new driveway. This house had a very funky second floor bathroom. It was one of those ones where the tub was built right into the slope of the roof line. In order to take a shower you either had to be a midget, or kneel in the tub because there was absolutely no head room due to the slope of the roof. We corrected this by extending the bathroom out into the main hallway. We pushed the main hallway over, taking some space from a bedroom and a small closet. This allowed us to move the tub out of the roof line and gave us a functional shower and tub.  

Onto the pictures; (you can see the before pictures HERE)

House for sale Fullerton St Springfield MA

53 Fullerton St Springfield MA

Home for sale springfield MA

Fullerton St Springfield MA

Staged Kitchen

Fullerton Kitchen, Stainless Appliances

Cabinets and breakfast bar top facing Dining Room

House for sale 53 Fullerton St

Fancy Built In Fridge, Tile Countertop

Dining Room with Breakfast Bar to Kitchen

Dining Room

Living Room with nice shiny Hardwood Floors

Living Room looking at Staircase

First Floor Bathroom Tub and Shower panel staged

First Floor Bathroom Vanity

53 Fullerton St Bedroom

New Second Floor Tub that we Moved out of the Roof Line

Flipped house bathroom

Second Floor Bathroom

New Boiler

 

Damn…. this place shines!!!! It has 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths and 1500 square feet. I really like the floorplan of this house as it has a great flow to it. We enhanced this by removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room, creating that great open feel and adding the breakfast bar.

We’ve got two more going on the market so I’ll post some updates and photos of those soon.

Comments

  1. breakfast bars are nice addition to the kitchen, i would really love to install them at my own home ,,.

  2. Thanks, Matt. Good to know, I appreciate the info.

    I think that there may be less offers on REOs now that the tax credit ended. We shall see!

    To your continued success!
    Steph

    • I agree.

      I think we’ll see alot more REO’s hanging around on the market, and the banks are gonna have to get more aggressive in pricing things to sell.

      -Matt

  3. This one looks great, too!

    Do you guys get most of your deals via the MLS (like this REO) or do you deal with mostly private sellers? Around us, it seems a little challenging to find deals cheap enough on the MLS to make the numbers work.

    Steph

    • Hi Steph,

      Lately we have been buying a mix of both.

      Up until about 7 months ago we were only working with private sellers and making deals that way. This house was actually the first REO/MLS listed property that we’ve bought.

      We’ve gotten a lot more aggressive in going after REO’s and have bought quite a few in the last couple months.

      -Matt

  4. Looks great Matt! Yet another great-looking rehab! I’ve noticed from previous posts that you put a FSBO sign out front of your completed rehabs. Do you typically conduct an Open House upon completion? Do you list them on the MLS yourself or through a broker? Just curious …

    • Thanks Zac,

      We put out a sign as we are nearing completion to generate some interest. I like to hold an open house our first weekend on the market but we don’t always do that.

      Both Dominic and I are agents so we do list all our own properties.

      -Matt

  5. It’s a nice looking flip, Matt. The glass tile accent in the shower is a sharp touch. Do you guys normally provide the fridge with each house? That’s always an expensive appliance….

    • Hi Greg,

      We put a fridge in every house. They are expensive, especially the stainless ones we usually do. The nicest and most expenisve one we did was a GE Cafe series french door fridge…. I love this fridge but it was alot of money (it retails for $2,900); http://flippingcrazy.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/102_6990.jpg

      We’ve got a connection at Lowes so we get all our appliances for somewhat of a discount. And we always have first dibs on the discontinued items, floor models, and scratch and dents.

  6. I don’t know what REO and MLS means but the house looks great!

    • Hi Aleks,

      REO means “Real Estate Owned”. It’s what the banks call the houses they own. So an REO is a bank owned house.

      MLS is the “Multiple Listing Service”. It’s where all the realtors advertise their houses for sale.

      Dom should be teaching you this stuff… lol

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