Selling a House That Needs Repairs In Allapattah? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Four units, unpermitted work, and a tenant who called the city

A fourplex in Allapattah — a quadplex, the way most people around here say it — that needed every repair there is. That part was simple enough. The complicated part was what had already been done to it.

The owner had carried out a number of repairs without pulling permits. People do that for a reason that is easy to understand — permits cost money and take time, and the work in front of you is real and needs doing now. It is also the decision that turns a maintenance problem into a records problem, and the records problem is the expensive one.

Then one of the tenants fell out with him and called code enforcement. It is worth being fair about that. A tenant who reports unpermitted electrical and plumbing work in the building he lives in is not doing anything unreasonable. But it meant the city was looking now, and the violations were open.

Which put the owner in a corner. Curing it was not a few weekends. It meant engineering plans drawn up first, then permits pulled for electrical, plumbing and the rest, then inspections, then whatever the inspections turned up. Tens of thousands of dollars, and several months at the optimistic end — realistically closer to a year. He had neither the money nor the time, and the building stayed full of people the whole time none of it was happening.

So he sold it to us. We took on the record, and we took on the tenants — including the one who had made the call.

That is the honest description of a purchase like this. It is not a discount on a building. It is somebody taking on a process with a firm start date and no reliable end date, on a property that stays occupied the whole way through. The owner was out from under it in a matter of weeks. Getting out from under it properly took a great deal longer than that, and it was ours to do.

Two open permits, a tenant, and no reason for anyone to move

This house came with two open permits that had violations attached to them — one for the roof, one for an air conditioning changeout — and a tenant living in it on a month-to-month basis.

Any one of those on its own is usually enough to end a conventional sale. A retail buyer needs a mortgage, the lender and the title company want a clean record, and an occupied property with unresolved permits is not something they will wait around for. Together, the three of them made the house very difficult to sell to anybody at all.

We bought it as it stood. The permits became our problem from the day we closed, rather than a list of things the owner had to work through first at their own cost.

And we kept the tenant. They seem like good people, and there was no reason to put them out of their home in order to buy a building. The plan is to improve the house around them, so that staying is the easy choice. Selling an occupied property does not have to mean somebody loses somewhere to live.