Need To Sell Your House In Coconut Grove? We Buy Houses For Cash.

A duplex, gutted twice over, and eighteen months at the city

People assume a house in Coconut Grove cannot be a problem house. It can. This one was a duplex, and it needed everything.

Not everything in the way that phrase usually gets used. The floor joists were replaced. The roof was replaced. Impact windows throughout, new central air, new plumbing, and new electrical run through the whole building. Then new stucco outside, finished flat, which is why the two photographs look like different buildings and are not - it is the same structure in both.

It was occupied when we bought it, and being a duplex meant doing all of it twice. Two of everything inside, on one programme, with one set of inspections to pass.

The part nobody sees is the eighteen months we spent at the city turning it into two townhouses, with its own folio number for each unit. A folio is the county's identifier for a property. Getting one for each half is what turns two sides of a building into two properties that can be sold, financed and insured separately - which is the difference between a renovated duplex and two houses.

The instrument that gets you there is a covenant in lieu of unity of title. Unity of title is what binds parcels together so they are treated as one; the covenant is the more flexible thing recorded in its place. There is no fast version of it. It is meetings, drawings, corrections and waiting, and it ran a year and a half.

We mention it because it is the honest shape of this work. The renovation was the visible half. The other half was paperwork nobody photographs, and it took longer than the building did.

A fourplex with fire damage and tenants still in it

Fire damage and problem tenants, in the same fourplex, at the same time. Small multifamily punishes you for exactly this — one building, four tenancies, and nowhere for a problem to be contained.

Either one alone makes a property hard to sell. Together they close the door almost entirely. No ordinary buyer can finance a fire-damaged building — no lender will lend and no insurer will write a policy on it — and the buyers who could pay cash mostly want it empty first, which puts the owner in the position of having to resolve the tenancies themselves before anybody will even discuss a price.

So the owner is asked to do the two hardest things on the list, at their own cost and risk, in order to earn the right to sell a building they no longer want.

We bought it as it stood, with the fire damage and with the people still in it, and dealt with both from our side afterwards.

Fire damage frightens sellers more than almost anything else, and it shouldn't. It is a large, ugly, well-understood repair. What actually makes a building unsellable is the assumption that somebody has to fix it before the sale.

Nobody could tell them what it was worth

A duplex-style property with an older couple living on one side and the other side sitting empty. Nineties finishes, a roof that leaked, on a piece of ground everybody agreed was excellent.

The heirs were a niece in Tampa and an uncle near Philadelphia. Neither was local. Neither could easily get to it.

Their real problem was that nobody could tell them what it was worth. Every agent they spoke to hedged, and not unreasonably — the repairs made the comparable sales useless. You cannot price a house against sales of houses that do not need a roof.

Meanwhile the rents no longer covered the taxes and the insurance, both of which had been climbing steadily. So the property was quietly costing them money every month while they waited for a number that was never going to arrive.

We gave them one — on the property exactly as it stood, with the people on the occupied side staying where they were. That turned an open-ended question into a yes or a no.

Sometimes what a family needs is not a higher number. It is a real one.