Deal: Before Pictures "Ugly House"

 

As you will see from the before pictures below this house needs some serious attention.  We have several city issues that we must correct before we can turn our attention to all the little things that will make this unit pop and rent quickly.  It is in a real nice part of town and is clearly the ugliest house for e several city blocks.  We estimate three weeks and 8-10k in repairs and a final rent of $750-$795.  The purchase price was $25K cash and had to be closed inside of 10 days. 

The Front of the House: 

The house will get nice new exterior paint job, the white room on the left side will be removed due to city issue and be replaced with a nice Patio and city area.  The wood on the windows is to protect them from being broken as the house has been used as a squatters place over the last 18 months (It has been vacant that long)

 

The soon to be Patio:

The white room as I call it was built without permits and has been flagged by the city for removal.  It was actually built right on the ground with just a few wood planks for the floor.  The patio will be a nice addition and increase the usefulness of the area as it will serve as a nice sitting area and be an easy way for tenants to enter the property with groceries; etc as parking is just behind the white room.

 

Carport, Fence and Rear Garage:

As you can see through the chain link there is a poorly built carport that will be removed as it is unsafe.  To the left of the picture you can see a poorly built fence is actually leaning on the rear unit and almost completely falling down.  To the right of the picture you see the rear of the white room that is being torn down and replace with a nice patio.  We will create a nice walkway from the parking strips to the patio for ease of use.  The final thing we look forward to doing is creating a garage door for the rear unit thus turning storage into a functioning one car garage.

 

The Neighborhood:

The second best thing about this property (first being the purchase price) is the neighborhood.  As the pictures below indicate this house is clearly the worst house on the block.  We will perform basic cleanup as described above.  If we ever chose to sell the building we will likely stucco the house as it will fit into the neighborhood better and increase the value.  But given the unit will start as a rental we will just clean it up with new paint as the added expense for Stucco will not increase the rental rate and just lower our cash on cash yield which is our main investment driver. The two pictures below are houses directly across the street and show the quality of the homes in the neighborhood.  We clearly bought the worst house on the block!!!

 

 

The Inside of the House:

I don’t have pictures of the inside of the house just yet as all the windows are boarded, there is no electricity and we only had one flashlight.  It will need the basics of carpet, paint, etc.  The kitchen seems to be in decent shape but the bathroom will need all new fixtures and new flooring.   I cannot wait to slap some paint on this bad boy as we are already getting interest from perspective renters.  But until all of the various city issues are behind us we won’t move on as we want to get the sign off from the city before any more surprise arise.  Looking for sign off in next 10 days (Today is 4/27/11)