House #17: Final Analysis

We closed on the sale of The Escher House today…

From start to finish, this was a fun project. Not only did we push ourselves to get this one done very quickly (4 weeks), but we did some major landscaping renovations that we’d never done on any properties before, so that posed some new challenges. While this was definitely a major renovation, the fact that there was no mold, not major water intrusion, and no major structural issues made this project seem like a piece of cake.

Our original budget on this one was $55K, which included all new siding. Later, we revised our budget to $45K (though we knew that was a stretch) and decided to just replace the siding on the front of the house, and repair/patch around the rest of the house. Ultimately, we ended up spending $50K, but were able to do a lot of extra work that we hadn’t originally planned (major landscaping, hardwoods in the living areas, repair some water issues in the front yard, etc).

In the end, my wife would have been thrilled to sell our personal residence and move into this house, which says a lot about how it turned out…

Here are some other highlights of this project:

• We sold the house for $15K above my ARV estimate, so there was some extra profit despite going over our budget.
• We were able to get the house under contract within 3 days of listing it.
• Our total hold time was only 64 days, despite this being a major rehab — both interior and exterior — and despite the fact that our buyers were FHA.
• Our appraisals came in at $5K and $10K above sale price, which is unheard of these days for $170K properties.

Timelines

Like I mentioned above, the total hold time on this house was 64 days. Can’t imagine it getting any better than that for a major rehab.

Here are the key timeline milestones:

• Purchase Offer Date: 3/1/2010
• Purchase Closing Date: 3/17/2010
• Rehab Completion Date: 4/22/2010
• Sale Listing Date: 4/2/2010
• First Sale Contract Date: 4/25/2010
• Final Sale Contract Date: 4/25/2010
• Sale Closing Date: 5/20/2010

Financials

This property was bought and sold a bit higher price point than most of our properties, but the numbers were solid all-around. We purchased for $75K, put $50K into it, and resold it for $175K. We purchased for cash, but did a refi with our rehab lender to pull our cash out, so there were some extra loan charges associated with the purchase. We also paid for both appraisals and our buyer’s inspection, to reduce their out-of-pocket expenses.

After all was said and done, our profit was a bit over $33K.

Here is the breakdown of financials for this project:

Our ROI on this project was just under 50% and our annualized ROI was just under 280%.

Final Statistics

Here are just some of the final statistics that I’ve been tracking for all my projects, and that summarize the success/failure of each project pretty well:

• From Offer to Purchase Time: 16 Days
• Rehab Time: 33 Days
• Selling Days on Market: 3 Days
• Selling Close Time: 25 Days
• Total Hold Time (Close to Close): 64 Days
• Total Profit: $33,188.41
• Return on Investment (ROI): 48.98%
• Annualized ROI: 279.33%