New Short Sale Deal – Chicopee

August 29, 2011 by 4 Comments

Here is the new short sale property that we picked up in Chicopee.

This is a 4 bedroom 1.5 bath cape with around 1,400 square feet. It’s located in a great neighborhood in Chicopee filled with similar starter homes.

It’s actually in pretty good shape and we plan on doing just a light cosmetic rehab; a quick fluff and buff. The exterior will be powerwashed, we’ll remove the ugly awnings and clean up the yard and landscaping.

Inside we’ll remove all the carpeting and shine up the hardwoods. We’ll patch and paint all the walls and ceilings, add new light fixtures,new ceiling fans, new switch plates and outlet covers.

We’re going to keep the existing cabinets and vanities, we’ll just dress them up with a little brushed nickel hardware.

Once all this work is complete…. it should only take a few days…. we’ll blow it out at a nice below market price to move it fast

Here are the before pictures for your enjoyment.

Chicopee MA short sale

Short Sale Chicopee

Kitchen

Kitchen

Half Bath

Full Bath

Living Room with Nasty Carpet

Bedroom

Neon Green Bedroom!!!!

Basement

Rear of House with Dormer

There it is… the classic New England Cape.

It already has the dormer off the back which is great. It makes the second floor so much more functional. We’ve got big bedrooms and a full bath on the second level.

 

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In other news, we closed on our first tornado damaged house in Springfield.

Here it is:

Tornado damaged house Springfield MA

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A really big tree came down on the whole right hand side of this tornado damaged home and took out the roof and most of the second floor of the house. I guess this is why they tell you to get in the basement when there are tornado warnings. Fortunately the house was vacant when the tree came through the roof.

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We are working on buying a couple other tornado damaged houses in Springfield and Wilbraham.  The tornado damaged houses should be some pretty interesting projects so I’ll keep you updated on these.

Well that’s it for now.

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111 Daviston St Property Update – Short Sale Flip

September 11, 2010 by 3 Comments

111 Daviston St Springfield MA

Time for a little pictorial update of our short sale rehab at 111 Daviston St in Springfield. You can see all the before pictures HERE .

Above is how it use to look, here it is after a new roof, new windows, new siding, painted trim and some landscaping…..

111 Daviston

We went with a different color siding on this one. We usually do tan siding with burgundy shutters, but a couple of the neighboring houses already had that color scheme going on, so we used a sage green siding with black shutters.

Inside we are adding a half bath to the first floor, redoing the kitchen and the upstairs full bath, installing all new plumbing and a new heating system.

Here are some photos of the work in progress;

Kitchen Gutted

Kitchen Gutted

New Half Bath

Laundry Hookup in new half bath

Second Floor Full Bath Gutted

Living Room

Main Hallway

We converted the pantry into a half bath and laundry room. This is located right off the kitchen so having the laundry in this location is going to be very convenient.

As of right now all the walls are closed up, everything is painted, the cabinets and granite are in, the hardwoods have been redone, and we are working on the finishing touches.

I’ll post some updated photos of the finished house soon!

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New Short Sale Flip – Daviston St

August 12, 2010 by 4 Comments

We are as busy as ever right now and things don’t look to be slowing down.

I’ve lost track of how many houses we are rehabbing right now, maybe 8-9. We’ve put the 3 new construction houses on the market in anticipation of finding a buyer first, then we will build to suit based on our rough designs and their preferences.

We have 4 houses under contrat to sell, with the possibilty of both 1892 Parker St and 8 Bosworth St closing today. Also we’ve got 3 houses under contract to buy, with offers out on another 2-3 that look pretty promising.

With all this activity we’ve finally broken down and have looked to start hiring some additional staff. Our immediate needs are to get some of the bookkeeping taken care of, as alot of that stuff has piled up. We’re thinking about hiring some VA’s to help with some of the accounting and maybe getting an intern or two to help with the work load. We’ll see how this goes.

Well, onto one of our latest short sale deals.

I wrote about this house a few months back in a blog post located HERE. It was a real pain in the ass to get this short sale closed as we hit roadblock after roadblock. Some of it was our fault for not doing a more thorough title examination, but the first had agreed to such a nice discount that we refused to let this deal die. We ended up having to pay off a bunch of junior leins and our purchase price got bumped up quite a bit, but the deal still worked.

The main problem with this house was that it had an underground oil tank. We were willing to take the house with the tank still in the ground, but we used this to get the price way down. Underground tanks can be very risky because if they are leaking the costs to remove and clean the contimination can be pretty substantial. We did take a few steps to mitigate our risk, and in the end we got the tank out of the ground with no leaks…. so it didn’t cost us as much as it could of.

On top of the oil tank this house needs alot of work. We are going to do a new roof, new windows, new siding, new driveway, new kitchen, new full bath, add a half bath to the first floor, new plumbing, new heating system, paint, floors, landscaping, etc……

Here are some pictures:

111 Daviston St Springfield

Daviston St Springfield MA

Rear of House, oil tank is under the Concrete Pad

Tank Removed

Kitchen

Bathroom

Living Room

Bedroom

Main Hallway

I’ll post some new pics of this house as we move along.

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Short Sale Rehab Complete and Under Agreement – House Flip Update

July 2, 2010 by 4 Comments

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

House for Sale Chicopee

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

Hampden Homebuyers House For Sale

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!!!!!

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New Short Sale Closed and Self Directed IRA’s

June 13, 2010 by 2 Comments

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: 

This house will be renovated and for sale in Chicopee MA

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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Dirty Pools, Short Sales, and New Website Updates

April 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The new site is still a work in progress. Its amazing how customized you can make these WordPress sites, with all the themes, plug-ins, widgets and who knows what else, it’s actually a little overwhelming. I should have the new site ready over the next few days.

On the house flipping front we are still cruising right along. We’ve got three new properties lined up that we should be closing on over the next 10 days…. and I just heard from my negotiator that we got another short sale deal approved today.

The three new purchases are all really good deals. Two of them are REO’s that we are buying through the same agent and one is a short sale that we have been negotiating for the last 10 months.

One of the bank owned houses has yet another pool. This is the fourth pool we’ve had to deal with in the last three months. We were thinking we may actually be able to save this one, but after draining it and having a pool company look at it closer, it turns out there are some problems that are going to make it too costly to fix. In determining if we are going to keep a pool we look at how much it’s gonna cost to fix it and get it up and running vs. how much it will cost to fill it in….. usually it’s just cheaper to fill them in…. and so that is what we do.  Of the four pools, one was an above ground that we knocked down, and three were inground that we filled in. Here in the Northeast pools add very little resale value, if any at all, so that is why we fill them in.

Heres a look at it before we drained it. This thing looked and smelled like a swamp. Notice the nice green color.

Green Pool

 

Dominic tried to throw a whole bunch of chlorine in their to clean it up, but I don’t think it worked.

I’ve got to share this video with you…. it’s the funniest thing ever. I was laughing so hard when I saw this on TV for the first time. This is Armando visiting our pool pictured above!!!!

LOL!!!!! Oh man I could watch that all day 🙂

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Ravenwood St Update

February 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Heres a look at the short sale property on Ravenwood St that we bought a few weeks back. This video was shot after the first couple of days of construction. You can see all the before pictures here.

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Hunting Down Short Sales and Deal Updates

February 11, 2010 by 16 Comments

Nowadays short sales are a dime a dozen, you don’t have to look too hard to find them…. but every once in awhile one will catch my eye that I really wanna buy. In order for a short sale to get me all hot and bothered it’s got to have a few key factors. First, it needs to be a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Secondly, it needs to be vacant. Thirdly, somethings happened to the house thats gonna make the bank motivated to move it, and will allow the BPO or appraisal to come in nice and low (i.e. burst pipes, hole in the roof, mold etc…).  

This was the case with a house that I’ve had on my radar for the last month. This particular property was located in a great neighborhood and had excellent curb appeal. It was very similar in style and location as to our house at 42 Wexford. I pulled up an old listing sheet on the house and it said the boiler was inoperable…. sweet!! I went by the house and peaked in the windows and saw the ceilings had caved in from burst pipes in the second floor bathroom…. double sweet!!! I figured this would be a slam dunk short sale as long as I could get in touch with the owner prior to the bank taking it back. I found a PO Box for the owner in Colorado and bombarded them with letters and postcards for the last four weeks. I finally received an email today from the owner telling me that they no longer own the house and to stop contacting him. “Well” I thought to myself… “he must be mistaken”. See, I checked the registry of deeds and the house was still in his name, and while the bank did file the foreclosure notice in October, they hadn’t actually gone through with any auction. I also checked all the auction sites and the public notices and the house wasn’t in any of them for the last four months. So I replied back to the owner letting him know that while the bank did file a foreclosure notice, there has been no auction and that he still owns the house and he can still sell it…. and further…. I want to buy it from him and lets get this thing rolling!!!  Well his response back crushed me. He said “I don’t know what the banks doing, but we deeded it back to them in lieu of foreclosure in December.” 🙁  DAMN….. thats the one thought I had when he initially said that he didn’t own in anymore, but a Deed in Lieu, who’s ever heard of a bank actually doing these?? I’ve been around quite few of these foreclosure situations and have never heard of a bank actually going through with a Deed in Lieu…. oh well… I guess they haven’t gotten around to recording the new deed, you know how fast these banks are. Looks like I’m gonna have to wait till it becomes an REO and bid against the 30 other investors that will be offering on it.

New House

On the deal front we just put this monster under contract to purchase:

Front of House

Eastern side of House

Eastern side of House

Western side of House

 Wow, She’s a real beauty!! This beast is 6 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths and over 3,000 square feet. It needs a major renovation and its in a historic district, so we have to play by a whole new set of rules. The good thing is we bought it real, real cheap ($16,000), but the rehabs going to come with a very hefty price tag!!

We’ve got a few other rehabs finishing up that I could post about… but this is getting too long so I will save those for another day…..

 Peace Out

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