Converting Single Family home to Multy Family

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Converting Single Family home to Multy Family

Dinesh Siwakoti
New Hill, NC · Member since 2017 · 7 posts · 0 votes

Greetings BP Community Members,

I am relatively new in this forum and to real estate in general. I have a question here, if there are any way we can convert tiny single family home sitting in 0.4 - 0.5 Acre to duplex/ triplex/ 4plex. 

I am looking for real estate opportunities on Rental Properties area where I wanted to buy Duplex/ Triplex / Four-plex. However, after some analysis , I came to know that in my area, the supply of such properties as extremely rare and there are 100's of investor ready to buy as soon as these properties are hitting the market. Or whatever are still not sold or available to purchase, those are unattractive in terms of investment perspective.

Now I wanted to shift the gear and look for those properties I described above (single family home sitting in 0.4 - 0.5 Acre to duplex), and convert them into duplex myself. Could you please guide me through understanding this in terms of how to identify whether or not I can do that. How to find out if local city will allow me to do so? 

Thank you very much for your advise. Kudos to all members of BP community. 

-Dinesh S.

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  • Frank Chin
    Investor · Bayside, NY · Member since 2017 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
    9y

    Dinesh, I've been a real estate investor for many years, and the wife worked for a few years as a "city planner" where she's involved with zoning issues. Generally speaking, areas zoned for one family is very difficult to build MF, as it disturbs the nature of the area. Technically, if you have a single family, you need a variance to change to a 2 or higher, and a public hearing is generally required. In my area, you're required to send notices for such variances to neighbors within 300 feet of your property, your local block association would show up, loudly object to it. Generally these SFR areas has good schools, and objections range from overcrowding to increased school taxes.

    In fact, they been very strict on illegal conversions where people convert basement to living units. The only allowance they allow is the addition of mother-daughter units where you actually have elderly parents or relatives moving in, and as you guess it, does not cause overcrowding in the local schools, or add much to local traffic, another pet peeve.

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  • Dinesh Siwakoti
    OP
    New Hill, NC · Member since 2017 · 7 posts · 0 votes
    9y

    Thank you Frank for your opinion and input.

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