Hampden Homebuyers - We Buy Houses Springfield MA Sell House Fast
We received an offer on Hartford Terrace after only four days on the market…. negotiations are underway so I’ll let you know what happens!
Bessemer St is moving right along and we should be finishing up the rehab over the next week or so. Have a look at the progress after week 7:
We’ve hit a few snags at the fire damaged three family. The next door neighbor isn’t happy about the dust from the demo so she called the cops on our contractor for working on a holiday (memorial day) and then she called the building inspector the next day… apparently she thought we were working without permits. No big deal, the inspector stopped by and everything looks good. Then on Thursday we got an unexpected visit from the Environmental Protection Agency…. seems someone called in an anonymous tip alleging that we were removing the asbestos boilers from the property on our own, instead of hiring the overpriced asbestos abatment companies. We’ve had four abatement guys over to look at the job in the last two weeks…. I’m not sure which one took the liberty of dropping a dime on us. I guess it’s their way of insuring they get work, call in the EPA so we don’t even consider removing it ourselves (which we never did). So the EPA guy says that there is a slight chance that their may be asbestos in the sheetrock we are removing and he gives us a Stop Work order until we get some samples tested. $450 bucks later the samples come back clean and we should be able to start work again on Tuesday. Here’s a look at the progress so far:
Not too much action on the exterior
Nice Banner
This porch is ready to come down on its own!!
Heres how the third floor looked a week ago
And the third floor now
Here’s where the fire burnt through the roof
We’ll probably lose four days because of this little hiccup. It wasn’t too bad because it gave our contractor a chance to get back over to Bessemer and do some painting.
We bought another house on Wednesday. It’s on Brooks St in Springfield. The good thing is that this one has already been rehabbed by the previous owner, not to our standard… but it’ll do. Heres a look at the house;
We bought this from a hard money lender out of CT who is also a pretty well known TV star on A&E’s Flip This House . Theres a few repairs we need to make to this house, nothing major though. Once thats done we’ll stage it and get it on the market.
We finally purchased the fire damaged three family this week and work is underway. This is a huge project, we are going to be gutting all three units to the studs and going back in with all new electrical, plumbing and heating systems. Outside the roof will be repaired and reshingled, we’ll do new vinyl siding, new windows (45 of them), demo the side porch and repair the front porch. This house is 3,720 square feet, it’s huge. When we’re done we’ll have three very big four bedroom apartments that should rent easily because everything is brand spankin new. Heres some photos of the demo work;
We’ve got four dumpsters on order just for the demo, but I’m thinking we may need more. The timeline for this job is 12 weeks. The first step will be to gut the house. Once all the walls are open the electrician and plumber can begin running all their rough plumbing and wiring. While their doing their thing inside the outside work will be getting done. This ones gonna be fun.
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.
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
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.
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.
It was a fun weekend here in Massachusetts. Friday night I went to my good friends wedding, Saturday was beautiful and I got a chance to do some yard work around my house. Sunday I took a trip to Bessemer St to check out the progress. We’re three days into the work and so far it’s been nothing but yard work, clean out and demo. I have a feeling this house is gonna take 5 dumpsters.
Speaking of Dogs…. I said I would post pictures of the dogs in their cages… here it is!!!!!
Dog in Cage
Breezeway After Cleanout
Kitchen after Cleanout and Demo
Wall being removed between Kitchen and Living Room
Bathroom after some Demo
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