House #4: Rehab Update

We closed on The Yellow Stain House this past Monday. In the past three days, we’ve accomplished a good bit:

– The foundation work was completed…while a good bit of the yard was dug up during the repair (they put anchors both against the interior foundation wall and outside the house), by the time they were completed, you would never have known they were there;
– We got word from our land surveyor that the structure is not in a Flood Plain! This is great news, and now we just need to send the right documentation to FEMA to have the structure officially removed from the Flood Plain;
– We cleaned the house top to bottom (and left to right…or was it right to left?);
– We painted the ugly green hall bathroom (the paint was in fine shape, but the color was horrible);
– We replaced some old light fixtures;
– We replaced much of the cabinet hardware;
– We replaced the old, cracked switches, switch plates, receptacles, and outlet covers;

The nice thing is that — other than the foundation and flood letter — we did all the work ourselves in just a couple hours. While I normally don’t like doing any of the work myself (I think I can earn more by hiring the work out), it would have been almost as time consuming finding a handyman and explaining what we wanted done as it was to do it ourselves.

Based on the outcome, I’m convinced we’ll be able to sell this house to another investor pretty easily, and barring that, we should be able to put another $6000 into the property and sell it retail for an even larger profit.

We’ve had a couple investors contact us about the property, and they will be looking at it tomorrow; also, an investor friend of mine is considering purchasing the property as well. If none of those leads pan out, we’ll put the property on the MLS for a week or so, and see if we can find another investor that way. Otherwise, we start the additional rehab, and we sell it to a nice family looking for a very nice home.