We wrapped up another eventful week here in beautiful Springfield, MA. We purchased two more rehab properties; a full gut in Springfield and a light cosmetic rehab in East Longmeadow. We put both of these properties under contract less than two weeks ago. It’s great to have access to that kind of Cash… and to be able to close on these deals in less than two weeks…. pretty powerful stuff when you are making offers to motivated sellers!!
We also finished up the rehab on two of our ongoing projects. 37 Mansfield St is complete and we accepted an offer on it prior to even having to put it on the market. One of our “preferred realtors” took a client through while we were finishing up and they made us an offer. After some negotiating we came to an agreement yesterday, with home inspection scheduled for Monday.
Our other finished property is a two family home located at 93 White St in Westfield MA. We started the rehab on this home earlier this year, prior to me even starting this blog, and we finally finished it. It was another fire damaged home and required a full gut renovation. The rehab took way too long, mainly due to us having to fire a couple of contractors, but it is finally complete and looks great. Here are some of the finished pictures:
Exterior
Kitchen - Unit 1
Kitchen - Unit 1
Bathroom - Unit 1
Living Room - Unit 1
Bedroom - Unit 1
Kitchen - Unit 2
Dining Area - Unit 2
Bathroom - Unit 2
Living Room - Unit 2
Bedroom - Unit 2
I’m not too sure how the market is in Westfield as we’ve never sold anything there before, however we already have 5 showings scheduled for this weekend, so I’m hoping we can move this one quickly.
After our two purchases this week we will now have 6 rehabs going with one more in the pipeline set to close in the coming weeks. The winter months tend to be a little slower on the resale side, but I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble moving our finished rehabs as they are always head and shoulders above our competition!!
Well we are looking at another very busy week. We should be closing on the purchase of two more rehabs and putting two finished properties on the market. One of the finished homes is our fire damaged two family at 37 Mansfield St, we actually received an offer on this property Friday…. before we officially even put it on the market…. however the price was a little lower than what we are looking for so we may either negotiate it up, or test the open market and see what we can get.
Also an update on 239 Plumtree Rd; we accepted an offer on this home last week. All inspections have been done and we should be good to close in another 2-3 weeks.
Video Update:
Heres a walkthrough we did of the property at 42 Wexford St in Springfield. This video was shot a few days after we closed on the house……
We’ve got so many projects going it’s hard to keep current video/picture updates on all of them…. but I’ll do my best to keep them coming!!
We just spent the last 5 days at a Raising Private Money bootcamp in Denver and we had a great time. The event was put on by my friends at Fortune Builders. We learned alot of info, met some great people and made quite a few new business contacts.
Now it’s back to work……
We closed on our first ever REO/MLS purchase last week. Working with the bank and closing the deal went very smooth. This property does need work, we are going to be installing new siding, new windows, adding a new kitchen and redoing both bathrooms. The major problem with this property is the way the second floor bathroom is layed out. They built the tub into the sloping roof line of the house, so if you are over 5 foot 6 there isn’t enough head room to take a shower. To fix this we are going to be gutting the bathroom and rearranging the layout to make it more functional.
Here are some pictures of the house;
Front View
Rear View
Kitchen
Kitchen
First Floor Bath
Living Room
Living Room 2
Dining Room
Second Floor Bathroom
Second Floor Tub built into Roof Line
Bedroom 1
Bedroom 2
Bedroom 3
This house has 4 Bedrooms 2 Full Baths and 1,500 square feet. It has a really nice floor plan and is gonna look great once we’re done with the renovation.
Things are still moving fast and furious! We’ve had six closings over the last few weeks with one more scheduled for Monday. In total we sold four of our properties and bought two new rehabs, with a third new rehab set to close Monday.
We spent today touring some of our projects with a couple of our private lenders from the Boston area. While we were out walking the properties we got two more offers accepted!! One is a MLS listed property that we offered on Thursday. The second is a private owner that we met with on Friday and presented them with an offer. Both are looking to close ASAP so we’re gonna be busy getting everything together for these purchases. These two properties are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum. The MLS property is in terrible condition and will be a full gut. It’s real nasty and kinda spooky…. just like Bessemer and the Ware House were. The second property is a very light rehab; condition wise it’s probably one of the better houses we’ve purchased. It will need paint and light kitchen and bath updates.
I’ve fallen behind with the updates on the fire damaged multi family on Mansfield St. We’re almost done with this one and should be able to get it to the market next week. Heres a pictorial timeline;
All the walls were insulated throughout the house.
The sheetrock was delivered and put on all three floors.
All the sheetrock was hung…. it finally looks like a house again!
Sheetrock gets taped and mudded (is that a word??)
Vandals break in and completely TRASH all our new walls
Just kidding…. thats a picture from when we were doing the Demo…. just making sure you’re still paying attention!
All our new walls are painted in our beautiful TAN
These pictures are from a few weeks ago. Right now all the hardwoods have been refinished, all the doors have been hung, everything has been trimmed out, the bathrooms are in and we are finishing up the kitchens. I’ll have some more current pictures/videos pretty soon.
well maybe not the whole house….. just the first floor.
Heres a look at how we fixed the fire damage at 70 Glenwood St. If you remember from my previous post(video or photos), the fire in this property started in the basement and burnt all the floor joists and support beams in the front half of the house. So to fix it we had to cut out the whole floor. Luckily I was there with my camera to capture the whole thing. Heres a look:
Cutting out the Floor
First Section Gone
Second Section Gone!
Almost There
Ripping out the Last Peice
Can We Save these Hardwoods??
All Gone!!
Looking at the Front Door from the Basement
Heres Whats Left of our Floor!!
After cutting out the whole floor our contractor rebuilt it from the ground up.
Heres our shiny new floor:
New Floor
And a look from the basement:
New Center Support Beam
New Floor Joists and Plywood
Whew, that was a lot of work…. I’m tired from just looking at those pictures!!
Things are moving right along at the Glenwood St project. Last week we passed all our rough inspections and insulation inspection. This week the sheetrockers were there hanging drywall, taping and mudding. Next step is to paint and begin all our finish work.
I made a short video of the fire damage at this property. The fire started in the basement at the old electrical box and burnt up through to the first floor. Most of the damage was done in the basement to the floor joists and support beams, including the main support beam. Have a look:
This week started off just like last week….. with a closing on Monday and another on Tuesday. We sold the Ware House on Monday and sold 39 Brooks St on Tuesday.
The Ware House - If you remember this beauty I was up in the air about rehabbing it or just wholesaling it. We closed on it, but because it’s located about 45 minutes outside our normal territory, we couldn’t get any of our contractors to travel out and do the work…. so I ended up putting it on the MLS and got a cash buyer who is going to fix it up and live in it. We only paid $15,000 for this gem so it was pretty easy to flip it out for a quick profit.
We are still waiting on the clear to close for Hartford Terrace, we should sell that at the end of this week. We also have two more purchases lined up for next week. These last few weeks have been really crazy as we have worked through all these closings….. by the end of next week we will have closed on seven properties in total, selling four of our properties and buying three new ones! I guess when it rains it pours!!!!!
Monday was a day of firsts for our business…. We closed on our first ever deal bought from a wholesaler, the English Tudor on Wexford St I wrote about in my last post. We put this house under contract last week on Tuesday and closed yesterday (the following Monday). Also it looks like we are going to be purchasing our first ever property off the MLS…. a bank REO that we have been offering on for the last three weeks, and finally got our offer accepted on Monday. While we have bought alot of properties over the last couple years, they have all been through dealing directly with the sellers. We’ve made quite a few offers on REO’s, and been pretty close on getting a couple accepted, but this one looks to be our first. I’ll post some pictures and a writeup about the home over the next few days.
On another note, we had our second closing of the week today…. we sold the house on Bessemer St. This deal took about 5 months from our purchase to the sale to our new buyer. It is definitely our best project to date. The renovations went very smooth and stayed within budget. The house turned out incredible and we had multiple offers the first day on the market. We ended up selling it for above our asking price and most important of all, the profit on this deal was very good!!
Things are really cranking along right now…. over the next two weeks we will be selling three of our properties (Hartford Ter, Brooks St, and the Ware House) and we will be buying two more rehabs.
