Hampden Homebuyers - We Buy Houses Springfield MA Sell House Fast
Heres a quick video we did of our Granger St property during demo. You can see all the before pictures of the house HERE.
This property is moving right along. We have the new addition/breezeway conversion built, all the mechanicals are roughed in, the sheetrock is up and the walls have been painted.
We started work on an awesome new project located at 64 Fullerton St. This house sits right across the street from our rehab we completed and sold at 53 Fullerton St.
We purchased both properties as REO’s. The nice thing about both Fullerton properties is that they each came with additional building lots that we were able to subdivide off. 53 Fullerton had 1 extra lot on the right hand side of the house. 64 Fullerton has 2 additional building lots, one located on each side of the house. Our plan is to find a buyer or 3 and build some new houses on our lots.
From the outside Fullerton doesn’t look like a bad house. It has newer vinyl siding and a new roof…. but once you get inside it is a different story, the house is pretty nasty. Everything inside the house is old, dirty and looks like crap, so we are going to gut it out and make it look nice!
The plan is to do all new electric, new heating system, new driveway, new plumbing, add a half bath to the first floor, new kitchen, new full bath, and rearrange the floorplan both upstairs and downstairs. We will also be redoing the giant 2 car garage that sits detached from the house.
Here’s a look at our before pictures:
64 Fullerton St
Garage
Addition off Side of Garage
Kitchen pic 1
Kitchen Pic 2
Living Room
Living Room
Dining Room
Full Bath
Tub - 2nd Floor
Bedroom 1
Green Slime Bedroom
Living Room
Hallway/Stairwell
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!!
Alot of you are probably familiar with the site BiggerPockets.com. It’s a great real estate investing site that features forums, articles and an awesome community. Joshua Dorkin, who runs Biggerpockets, recently put together a list of the Top 20 Real Estate Investing Blogs, and I’m proud to say that our FlippingSmart.com made the list!!! There are alot of good blogs on there, many of which I visit regularly, so make sure you check it out.
Things are still cranking along with all our various rehabs. I think we are renovating 8 houses right now, with another two ready for construction.
One of the jobs underway is a probate deal that we picked up a few weeks back, located at 51 Crystal Ave. This house was referred to us by an agent that we’ve bought quite a few properties from. We actually put the house under contract back in March, but we had to wait for the probate process to be completed, which took about another 3 months.
This is another gem. It had been vacant for several years and all the mechanicals were shot. We are going to be doing a complete rehab of the house, both the interior and exterior. It will get a new roof, new siding, new windows, new electric, new plumbing, new heating, new insulation, new sheetrock, 2 new baths, new kitchen, etc….. We are also going to be changing the layout a bit to make the third floor more accessible and to better utilize all the square footage within the house.
Now, I coulda sworn I took some before photos of this house, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. When I went back to get some the guys had alreay started the demo and the new roof was being put on…. so here are some pictures of Crystal Ave after a couple days of work….. Enjoy
51 Crystal Ave
Crystal Ave
The house looks like it’s brick… but it’s not. Thats a faux brick siding that they use to use back in the day. I think it’s made out of asphalt, like roof shingles. You can see in these pictures above that we already have the old roof ripped off and the new plywood is up.
There was a porch off the back of the house that we ripped off because it was falling down and unsafe. You can get a better look at that fake brick siding in this picture.
Above is a look at the kitchen, which has been mostly gutted out.
First Floor Half Bath
Second Floor Full Bath
Second Floor Full Bath Gutted
Living Room
Staircase
Master Bedroom
Dining Room
Stained Glass Window
This house is 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths with about 1,400 square feet. We’re gonna add some additional square footage and another bedroom. We bought this property for $25,000.
Time for an update of our rehab at 35 Dorothy Ave in Chicopee.
We purchased this property as a short sale. This was definitely one of our quicker short sale negotiations, and we hit very few snags during the closing process, which was great because that is usually not the case with short sales.
The rehab of the property also went very smooth. The major improvement we made was converting the home from a two bedroom to a three bedroom. We did this by converting the old dining room into the third bedroom. We created space for an eat in kitchen by eliminating some excess cabinets along the rear wall of the kitchen and by opening up the wall between the kitchen and living room to create a more open space.
We put the home on the market last weekend and accepted an offer within 1 day!!! This was a very encouraging sign to us becase even with the first time buyer tax credit gone we are still moving our finished rehabs quickly.
Here are the finished pictures: (you can see the before pictures HERE)
35 Dorothy Ave Chicopee MA
35 Dorothy Ave Chicopee
Rear view of house and Garage
New Kitchen
35 Dorothy Kitchen
35 Dorothy Kitchen, New Eat In area
This kitchen really came out awesome!! We added granite counter tops and a top of the line Samsung stainless steel appliance package. As usual we did 18×18 tiles on the kitchen floor, but this time we laid them in a staggered pattern. The staging adds the finishing touch to make this great kitchen shine.
Dorothy Ave living room
Dorothy Ave living room
We found some really nice hardwood floors under that nasty old shag carpet. A little sanding and some poly and these babies shine!!!
35 Dorothy Ave Bathroom
35 Dorothy Bathroom
Bathroom
The bathroom received a complete makeover. We added all new fixtures, tiled the floor and did our signature tiled tub surround with glass tile inlay. The staging brings some more color into the bathroom and gives it the finishing touches.
Bedroom
Bedroom 2
The bedrooms were pretty straight forward…. some paint, redo the hardwoods, add add some new doors.
Finished Basement
Finished Basement with Wood Stove
Basement
The finished basement came out really sweet and is a great selling feature. The nice thing about this house is it has two wood burning stoves, one in the basement and one in the living room. Those two stoves alone could probably heat the house throughout the winter.
So there it is….. 1 day on the market even with the tax credit being gone.
We are dealing with the whole 90 day seasoning mumbo jumbo, as the buyers lender doesn’t want to embrace FHA’s new policies doing away with the 90 day rule, but it’s not gonna affect our closing timeline too much.
Well thats it for tonight. I’ve got 7-8 more properties that we are working on that I haven’t even mentioned yet, so I’ve got some catching up to do!!!!!
Wow, I haven’t posted in quite awhile…. I apologize as I’ve been in Seminar Land.
I spent the last 5 days attending Than Merrills Marketing and Wholesaling bootcamp in Boston. I learned a ton of new info and met some great people. This is the fourth time I’ve attended this bootcamp and I always pick up new things each time. It seems like every year I go back our business is at a different point and I learn alot of new things that I hadn’t picked up on before.
I first took this bootcamp back in the summer of 2007 and really credit Than and his seminars in helping me put all the pieces together to get our business rocking and rolling!! I’m not sure when he’s going to be holding it again…. but if you’d like more info you can check it out HERE .
Even though we took some time off to attend the seminar we still managed to purchase 6 properties over the last two weeks! That’s pretty crazy!!!
We closed on three houses last week and three houses the week before. All six are rehabs so we now have our plate full with properties. I am way behind on the property updates. We’ve got quite a few houses now that I haven’t even posted on. I’m going to work to get some photos and videos together of all these projects.
While at the seminar I had some time to sit back and look at what we’ve accomplished in 2010. So far this year we have purchased 15 properties, we’ve sold 5, and have another 5 under agreement to sell in the coming weeks. Those are some pretty sweet numbers, and puts us ahead of our target of doing 2 houses per month. I think it’s time to up the goal to 3 houses per month!!
I hope all of you are reaching your goals for 2010. If your not email us with your challenges (info@hampdenhomebuyers.com), or post them in the comment section and we’ll try to help!!!
We spent the last couple days in Boston at a Pensco Trust Company symposium learning about all sorts of different alternative investments that can be made using a self-directed IRA. There’s so much you can do with your IRA beyond just buying stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Did you know you can buy and sell property within your IRA tax free?? You can wholesale real estate contracts, buy rental property, give notes and mortgages, and buy tax liens.
Since the majority of our private lenders use self-directed IRA money to lend on our deals, we find it helpful to stay on top of whats happening in this area. If you have any questions or want more info on self-directed IRA’s leave a comment below or shoot us an email at info@hampdenhomebuyers.com.
Now onto one of our latest short sale deals.
We started negotiations on the property at 35 Dorothy Ave in the beginning of January and had an approval by mid March. This is really fast seeing as how most of our other short sale deals have taken 6 months to a year to get approvals. I think this one went so fast because we were dealing with a small servicer and we had direct access to the Sr. Asset Manager who was very responsive and proactive in his approach to getting the approval. This asset manager would actually call and email us looking for updates if he hadn’t spoken to us in a few days. This is a very refreshing approach as compared to dealing with the likes of Bank of America or Citi, where every little task takes them 30 days to assign or review.
So we closed on Dorothy Ave right at the end of April. This is a real cute ranch home located in a great neighborhood in Chicopee. It needs the usual updates; kitchen, bathroom, etc…. but the biggest improvements we are going to make is converting it from a 2 bedroom to a 3 bedroom and finishing off the basement. Adding bedrooms and additional square footage is a sure fire way to raise the value of any house!!!
Here are some pictures:
35 Dorothy Ave, Chicopee MA
Garage - 35 Dorothy Ave
Overgrown Back Yard
Kitchen
Kitchen 2
Bathroom
Living Room
Master Bedroom
Well that’s it for now.
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Things are wrapping up at our rehab on 8 Bosworth St in Springfield. All the construction is finished, the home inspection was completed last week and we are waiting on the appraisal now.
This is an interesting property because we sold it just a few days after we initially purchased it. The buyers went through our property at 53 Fullerton St and fell in love with that house. We ended up getting multiple offers on 53 Fullerton and they missed out on it. We told them not to worry because we had a few other houses in the pipeline that would be as equally beautiful.
We took them through Bosworth St, and while we had only been working on the house for a couple days, they were able to see through all the mess and picture our finished product. They wanted it to look just like Fullerton St…. which wasn’t a problem because we finish all our homes in a very similiar fashion.
So long story short, we bought the house on April 20th and had an agreement to sell it by April 27th.
Here are some of the pictures of the work wrapping up: (you can see the before pictures HERE)
8 Bosworth St Springfield
Bosworth St Kitchen 1
Bosworth St Kitchen 2
Dining Room with Shiny Hardwoods
Living Room
Fireplace
First Floor Bath
Master Bedroom
Second Floor Bath
Shower panel with BodyJets. Glass Tile Inlay
We’ll be testing the new FHA seasoning rules on this house, as we haven’t owned it anywhere near 90 days, so I’m hoping we won’t hit any snags there.
So, lesson learned here, if you receive multiple offers on one of your houses, don’t let the losing bidders get away… those are “ready to go” buyers, and if you have other inventory try to steer them towards that.
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