Diary of our first Historical Rehab and Company Rebranding
Before I get Started. @Joshua Dorkin
@Karen Margrave suggested that I @mention her, you, Will Barnard, J Scott, and Jon Klaus for a diary that I'm going to do on BiggerPockets for our first venture into a historical renovation. For some reason, I can't successfully mention anyone but you. Hopefully you can reply to this forum post and @ mention the forum members that Karen suggested.
I think this diary could be very useful for the Bigger Pocket community as Historical Renovations are a very niche product. I've also done a lot of brand work that will help to sell our houses in an area that has a lot of flip competition. What we are looking to pitch our company as, is relatively unique. We are looking to basically provide a custom home building experience to redeveloped historical (some officially others just in old neibhorhoods) urban houses by providing the same level of service that a high quality custom builder provides to their clients.
INTRODUCTION
I'm currently working on our first and second historical renovations in the historic Deutschtown neighborhood in the North Side of Pittsburgh. We have renovated 4 homes in the area, many with historical features, but this is the first house we've done that has required approvals for facade renovations with the city Historical Review. More importantly, the scale here is dramatically larger than other projects we've done in the past.
Our previous projects have had purchase prices in the $20k-$50k range with renovation costs in the $80k-$150k range. We purchased our current properties (2 side by side attached 2,900 sq ft brick park front homes) for $135k and estimate rehab costs to be $395k-$435k.
We plan to Sell the homes for between $395k and $440k per house. The range is partially do to my initial estimate on sales target possibly being a bit too low, and because we will custom finish the homes and buyers will have an array of finishing options. We also plan to market these homes like a new home builder. I'll detail how we plan to differentiate in that way in another post.
Like J Scott's diary, my hope is that this thread will end up being a helpful case study, not only for historic renovations, but also for creating a brand for your flipping/renovation business.
I will try to be as thorough as possible in my posts, including pictures, schematics, design boards, optional features we plan to offer, marketing and branding materials, and of course a thorough documentation of our construction process.
I'm hoping that this process will be helpful and insightful for members at BP, but also that experts with more experience than me will chime in so that hopefully I learn a lot as well.
I will follow up with my first post in the diary shortly.