Another House with Burst Pipes!! – Agawam Rehab

Here’s another house that we picked up from the bank with some burst pipes, just like our 84 Rhinebeck Ave house.

It seems like every spring we score a couple of these rehabs.

You all know the story… owner moves out in Fall/Early winter…. bank doesn’t get in there to winterize the pipes…. come springtime once things thaw out a little you have water running down the ceilings and walls. If the house sits for a little while you start to get mold everywhere.

Fortunately we got to this house before the water damage was too bad and any mold could set in.

Our Agawam house is a two story colonial and all the damage happened to the first floor.

We are gonna be replacing all the water damaged walls and ceilings on the first floor. Redoing all the hardwood flooring that was damaged. We will be adding a new kitchen, redoing the half bath and a whole bunch of other nice upgrades and improvements.

The exterior of this house is in great condition, the roof is newer, the windows are new, and the siding is new…. so we barely have any work to do outside.

Here are some pics of this beauty:

Agawam MA rehab

Rear View

Pool

We got another pool with this house. We’ve filled in a number of these over the years because they were too far gone to salvage…. however this one was just installed in 2008 and seems to be in real good shape…. so I think we are finally gonna be able to save a pool here.

Kitchen

Living Room/Dining Room

Dining Room

First Floor Half Bath

Master Bedroom

Full Bath

Bedroom

Bedroom

Another Look at some of that Damage

The bank was really motivated to move this quickly before any further damage was done by the water and before some serious mold set in. We used this to our advantage, offering a very fast closing timeline, and this helped us to get the deal done.

For those of you who live down south where it is always warm, I feel bad that you will never be able to experience the joys of frozen pipes…. and the rush that comes with making a deal on these types of homes!!! 🙂

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84 Rhinebeck Ave Rehab Progress – House Flip Update

Here’s a look at our 84 Rhinebeck Ave property in Springfield.

We gutted out all the damaged sheetrock and floors.

In these photos you can see all the beautiful new sheetrock taped and mudded.

84 Rhinebeck Ave Springfield House For Sale

Rhinebeck Living Room

We opened the wall between the living room and kitchen to give the space a nice open and airy feel. Look at how smooth that tape job is!!!

 

Kitchen Gutted Out

Heres a look at the kitchen all gutted out with the new sheetrock hung. You can see some of the rough electric and plumbing in. We also added some recessed lighting in both the kitchen and living room.

Bathroom

Here is one of the 2 full baths with all the colorful new sheetrock hung. You can also see the new vinyl replacement windows that we added throughout the house.

84 Rhinebeck Ave Home For Sale

Here is one of the upstairs bedrooms with all the walls painted. We will put down a new subfloor and then probably add some berber carpeting to the room.

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This ones probably gonna be finished up within the next week.

We’ll have it staged and for sale soon.  I’ll post the finished pics so you can see the amazing transformation!!!!

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New Springfield Rehab- Rhinebeck Ave House Flip

We picked up another nice rehab property in Springfield.

It seems like every winter /spring we get 1-2 properties with frozen pipes and some pretty bad water damage. The good thing is these are pretty straightforward rehabs… just gut out the damaged ceilings, walls and floors, and fix the busted plumbing.

The nice thing about these types of properties is that the sellers are usually pretty motivated to get rid of them. Most sellers realize that if the house sits for too long with all that water in there then the mold is gonna start growing fast…. and as soon as that mold sets in the price goes way down!!

Rhinebeck Ave is a really nice 4 bedroom 2 full bath cape located in an awesome neighborhood in Springfield. This cape already has a 60% dormer, so we don’t even have to worry about doing a dormer addition.

The exterior is pretty good, all we really have to do is new windows, powerwash, and maybe add a new garage door.

Inside we need to gut out all the water damaged sheetrock and floors, add a new kitchen, do 2 new baths, new flooring, fix the busted pipes, new sheetrock, open up the floorplan and add some new lighting.

Heres a look at the house:

84 Rhinebeck Ave

Rhinebeck Kitchen

Livng Room

Dining Area

First Floor Bath

Bedroom

Second Floor Bedroom

Second Floor Bathroom

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The owner had been renting the house out for years and you can see that it was pretty dated and needed some rehab even without the burst pipes.

Ours guys have been working over there for a couple weeks and it’s almost finished. I’ll post some more pics of the progress of the job as we move forward.

 

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New Longmeadow Rehab – Shady Side

Well, we have another rehab in the beautiful town of Longmeadow underway.

This property is a huge executive ranch set in one of the premier neighborhoods of Longmeadow. The home is 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, has a huge master suite with master bath, and is nearly 2,600 square feet with a two car garage.

The house was in the same family since it was built and needs tons of updating. We are doing a new kitchen, new baths, new flooring, new paint, new lighting, new roof, new windows, lots of landscaping, new garage doors, new driveway etc…….

Overall its a pretty straight forward rehab, but the sheer size of the house and volume of work will be the main challenge with this project.

We made this deal during the heart of the winter when their was 18 some odd feet of snow on the ground… which made assessing the grounds and exterior of the house a bit more challenging. Once all the snow melted up we realized their was quite a bit more yard clean up and exterior work needed then we thought.  Oh well…. that’s what you get for buying houses in the winter in New England!

Here are some before pics of 130 Shady Side Dr. (Look at all that snow)

130 Shady Side Dr Longmeadow

Here it is with most of that Nasty snow melted

Huge Living Room

Double Door Front Entry with Ugly Tile Floor

130 Shady Side Dining Room

Very Old Kitchen

Another View of the Dated Kitchen

Laundry Room off Kitchen

Family Room with Fireplace

Half Bath

Master Bedroom

Master Bath

Main Hallway Bath

Dueling Furnaces

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There it is….. straight out of the 60’s!!

The house is so big that they have two furnaces to heat the two separate zones of the house.

We’ve had our contractors out working at the house for the last 3 1/2 weeks and it is nearly complete. The guys are flying right along!!!!

I’ll post some updates of the progress soon.

 

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11 Kitchen and Bath Trends for 2011

 

As everybody knows, it’s the Kitchen and Bathrooms that can make or break your renovation.

Staying on top of the latest trends can help you give your buyers exactly what they’re looking for.

Here’s an interesting article I came across highlighting 11 Trends in Kitchen and Baths for 2011:

http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/home-equity/11-kitchen-and-bath-trends-for-2011/3750/?tag=content;col1

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Which of these trends are you incorporating into your renovation projects?

If your seeing any trends in kitchens and baths share it with us in a post below.

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House Flip Before and After – 93 White St

I haven’t done any of these cool before and afters in a long time. I’m about 20-30 properties behind 🙁

I’m gonna make a point to get caught up so you can see all our beautiful transformations!

 

Here is a look at the before and afters of our rehab at 93 White St in Westfield. This was a fire damaged 2 family house that had sustained significant fire damage to the second floor unit. We ended up gutting both units and doing a full renovation.

 

 

 

How to Find Buyers for your Houses

With the expiration of the first time home buyer tax credit last spring we saw a pretty good decline in buyer activity. The tax credit pulled a ton of demand forward, as everyone was trying to get in under the wire and grab their $8,000.

Knowing the market would slow quite a bit we had two options; 1. Stop buying and see how things shake out…. or 2. Keep on buying and put a renewed emphasis on finding buyers for our houses.

Now since I’m addicted to buying houses, and I can’t imagine ever stopping, or even slowing down for that matter, we chose the second option.

In the past, For Sale signs in the yard and placement on the MLS was working real good for us to sell houses….. but in this post tax credit era I knew we were going to need to do a little more. So what did I do? I took to the internet and began really pushing our properties there, with my weapon of choice being Craigslist.

Now, I’ve used Craigslist in the past with minimal success. It seemed to me that there was nothing but tire kickers and time wasters on there. However, since really making a commitment to putting up some great ads and being consistent in my postings, we’ve been able to find buyers for 6 of our properties from Craigslist ads since October. Thats pretty darn good!!

There are a few keys that I’ve discovered to make your ads work really well which I have listed below.

1. The most important thing is having a great headline. Your headline must grab peoples attention and make them open the ad. I’ve crafted up a few that have been working awesome, and I think this is the number one reason for our recent success on Craigslist. Once people open our ad and get a look at the pictures of our houses they fall in love…. but the key is getting them to open that ad, and thats done with a killer headline!!

2. The second key to success is being consistent with your ads. Make sure you post them 2-3 times per week so they stay fresh. I used to post an ad here or there, every other week or so, and wasn’t getting any results. There are always new people searching on Craigslist so you want to stay on that first page if you can. This is a great job for an assistant, intern ,or VA.  On the flip side, don’t become a spammer and post your property 6 times per day from multiple email accounts. That just gets annoying and is sure to turn off any potential buyers!!

3. The third key for me has been putting a link to our www.HampdenHomebuyers.com website within the ad where potential buyers can see a list of all our properties for sale. So, if for whatever reason the property ad they clicked on doesn’t suit them, they can browse our other gorgeous homes and find one they like. This worked with one of our recent buyers. She clicked on one of our rent-to-own craigslist ads and while on our website she fell in love with one of our rehabbed houses that was not rent-to-own. She called her mortgage broker right away and found out she was right on the cusp of being able to qualify. We worked with her a little and now she is going to be able to buy our rehabbed property in the next 30-60 days. Obviously you need to have multiple properties for sale at any one given time for this to work… and if you don’t have multiple properties for sale you need to get off your butt and get out there and buy some!!!! What are you waiting for!!!

4. The last thing I’ve found to work is to have multiple ways for potential buyers to contact you. Everybody likes to communicate in different ways, so through our Craigslist ads people can email us, call us, or go onto our website and fill out a buyer form requesting more information.

Not everyone who contacts you is gonna buy one of your houses, so this is a great way to start building your buyers list. Make sure you get peoples names, phone numbers and emails addresses so you can keep in touch with them about any other properties you may have going forward.

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Well thats all I’ve got for tonight. I was going to post some updates on some of our deals, and maybe talk about some of the new properties we have in the works…. but this post got real long.

I hope you find the above information useful in your quest to sell some of your houses.

Remember, if you like our blog posts you can subscribe in the upper right hand corner under the heading “Subscribe to this Blog”, that way you get an email whenever we make a new exciting, awesome, informative and inspirational post!!!!

 

Fernleaf Ave, Longmeadow– House Flip Update

House for Sale Longmeadow MA

27 Fernleaf Ave Longmeadow MA before

Our rehab at 27 Fernleaf Ave in Longmeadow MA is nearly complete.

This is an awesome stucco house that has big rooms and lots of square footage. It is 6 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths spread over three floors of living space.

We’ll get it cleaned and staged this week then it will be for sale!!

Heres a look:

Buy house Longmeadow MA

27 Fernleaf Ave For Sale

House for Sale Longmeadow MA

View from Front Door with Wall removed between Living Room and Kitchen

Fireplace in Living Room with Built in Window Seats

Same view but here you can see the Coffered Ceiling. We kept it dark for a nice Contrast

Fernleaf Ave House for Sale

Living Room Archway, Center Staircase

Living Room looking towards Kitchen with Wall Removed and Archway

Kitchen w/ Cherry Finish Cabinets, Granite Countertops

Kitchen with Tile Backsplash and Tile Floors

Gourgeous Kitchen Aide French Door Fridge

Dining Room

First Floor Half Bath

Staircase

Second Floor Full Bath with Granite Double Sink Vanity

Tile Tub Surround with Glass Block Feature/ Jacuzzi Tub

Bedroom with Shiny Hardwood Floors

House for sale Fernleaf Ave Longmeadow

One Last Kitchen Shot!!!

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This home is gonna look really amazing once we get it staged.