Mid-Renovation and Need Money

[John Friendas]

What would you do in my situation?

I am mid-renovation, the home is partially gutted and I plan to have a general contractor take over and finish the project. It has been undergoing renovations for over a year and I learned that I am not a good general contractor. My thought was to take out a renovation-type loan (homestlye, dscr) and to get the project completed. 

Rough numbers:

Renovation amount needed: 150k

Current mortgage: 140k

ARV: 375k

Expected total monthly rents: $5,000

I have had a string of bad subcontractors. I would really be relying on this new general contractor to be a good one.

[Michael Eskenasy]

You may already be thinking about it this way, but the real decision here probably isn’t which loan product to use — it’s whether finishing the project actually improves your risk position.

Based on your numbers:

ARV ~375k

Current debt ~140k

Remaining work ~150k

That puts you around 290k all-in if everything goes according to plan.

That’s still a reasonable margin on paper, but the bigger risk in situations like this is that unfinished projects tend to expand in scope once a new GC takes over. The contractor has to correct unknown issues from prior work, which can turn a $150k finish budget into something larger.

Before committing to new financing, I’d probably want to understand three things:

1. What the property would realistically sell for today as-is to another investor.
2. Whether the $150k scope has been fully re-bid by a GC who is responsible for the entire finish.
3. Whether your timeline to stabilization (and tenants paying that $5k/month) is actually predictable.

Sometimes the lowest-risk move in a stalled renovation isn’t finishing it — it’s resetting the project structure so you know exactly what the remaining scope and timeline are.

If the ARV and rent assumptions hold, the deal still works. The key is making sure the remaining $150k is the last major capital decision, not the first of several more.