Hartford Terrace, finished and staged

May 18, 2009 by 14 Comments

Here are some photos of the Hartford Terrace house all completed and staged. We generally do some light staging of the kitchen, bathrooms and any other points of interest within the home (I love fireplace mantles). The house came out pretty freakin sweet!!!! Check out the photos:

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Alright, don’t those photos make you just want to buy this house!!! It is gorgeous and in an awesome location; on a terraced street across from a school and a park. I’ll get some before and afters up so you can see the transformation we made to this property.

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Closing… my favorite seven letter word

May 9, 2009 by 3 Comments

Every real estate investor knows that closing days are very special….. whether you are selling a finished rehab, or closing on that great deal you just spent the last few weeks negotiating. It’s the culmination of all your hard work, endless phone calls, restless nights, and dealing with attorneys, lenders, buyers, sellers and agents….. and hopefully they result in nice paydays.

On that note, we sold our short sale rehab on Arnold Ave today. We put together a short little case study video on the deal…….

This property was a rehabbers dream …. a cosmetic renovation that we were able to purchase at a big discount, rehab quickly, and sell the first day on the market!

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Hartford Terrace

May 7, 2009 by 1 Comment

Heres a look at the house on Hartford Terrace with the floors refinished, nice and shiny!!  They look much nicer than they did before.

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Next up will be the staged photos……

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Completed Rehabs

May 5, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I’ve added a page for Before and After photos and videos of our finished projects, as I know everyone loves these. I will post more as time permits…. but check out this property we just finished last month.

Atwater Rd

We got a buyer for this one at our first open house…. and should close any day now if Bank Of America would get their act together.

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Friday Already?

May 2, 2009 by 2 Comments

Dang these weeks are flying by…. Well as expected we hit some delays on a couple of our closings, and only ended up buying one property, the other four are on hold due to banks and appraisers mucking things up.

Bessemer is still moving right along. Here is a video update:

Here’s a look at the front of the house with the new roof, new windows, and stripped siding.

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Five Closings and Stainless Steel Appliances

April 26, 2009 by 2 Comments

It’s a gorgeous day here in Springfield, MA. Right now the thermometer reads 80 degrees.  My partner Dominic just made me aware of something I didn’t realize, we could have five closings this month week. If it happens it will definetly be a record for us. A few years back when I was starting this business I would have been happy to have five closings in a year!!!  Things tend to come up last minute which may delay one or two but what should happen is; we sell two of our finished rehabs, we purchase one pretty house sub2, we purchase one rehabbed house at 70% of ARV, and we purchase the fire damaged three family. We’ve been FLAT OUT BUSY this whole year…. I love this depressed RE market.  

  One little tip I wanted to share is about Stainless Steel Applainces. We have been adding them to all our finshed rehabs, even the lower end starter homes… and the feedback from buyers has been awesome. It is an added detail that puts your finished rehab way ahead of the competition, and is one of the major reasons why I think our houses have been selling so quickly (less than two weeks on market).  Now stainless steel can be expensive so what we do is frequent Lowes and buy all the open box/ display models/ returns that they put out on the weekends. The key is to make freinds with the appliance workers and get them to call you when any good ones become available. We’ve made freinds with associates from both the Lowes near us and they will call us when they’ve got something good. We usually pick up stainless or clean steel appliances for a little more than the brand new white appliances.

Check out this kitchen:

Arnold Ave Kitchen

Arnold Ave Kitchen

This is an 864 sq. ft. ranch. We sold it in one day for above asking price at $121,000. We kept the original 80’s style cabinets that I always like to replace. However once we added the stainless appliances and staged it you don’t even notice the old cabinets anymore!! 
Well I’ve got to run to Lowes, they have a stainless steel Bosch dishwasher that retails for $540 dollars that we are picking up for $315. This will be going into the house on Bessemer.
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One Week at Bessemer

April 25, 2009 by Leave a Comment

We are one week into construction on Bessemer St. Here is a video update:

Construction for this project should run another seven weeks. So far we have been very happy with our new contractor Jason. We have had some bad experiences with contractors over the last six months… cost us alot of time and money….  There are alot of guys out there right now who are very hungry for work and they will tell you they can do anything, than you give them a project and you soon find out they are in way over there head. Just make sure you are screening them well.

I think we bought another house yesterday… we still have to execute contracts but we came to a verbal agreement. I’ll post more details about this one in another post.

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Day 4 Highlights

April 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Heres a video I took Monday of the progress so far at Bessemer St. Things are moving along well.

We are starting to get some good publicity from this project. We did a photo shoot yesterday with our local paper that is going to be running a story about the house and our rehab work. We were also invited to a Springfield Community Group to talk about this house, our company, and how we renovate houses and improve neighborhoods. Several of the attendees were giving us leads on vacant houses that needed work! 

Still no closing on the fire Damage Three Family, there are some title problems that need to be fixed. We did put in an offer on another three unit property located in Forest Park. It is a pocket listing that an REO agent brought to us. We’ll see what the bank thinks of our offer. We’re about $20k below what they are hoping to get for the property. If we can make a deal it will probably be a buy and hold for us as it will cash flow very nicely.

I’ll post some more updates tommorrow about our other deals and what we are currently working out.

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