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

Twenty-four units, and violations for work he says he never did

A twenty-four unit multifamily building on the Liberty City side of the Brownsville line, inherited, and three years behind on taxes. The taxes alone run thirty thousand dollars a year, so three years of them is not a small number. There was no insurance on the building at all.

It was largely abandoned and in bad condition. People were in the empty units who were not tenants — using them for drugs and for sex work — and there were dogs loose in the building. It was a dangerous place. Dangerous for anybody going near it, and dangerous for the people inside it, which is the half that usually gets left out.

The owner was living in one of the units. He was also doing the repairs himself, and that is where the real trouble started, because he was not a contractor. The work was mismatched and none of it was done well.

Then the citations began. This is the part worth reading twice: he told us the city was citing him for work he had not done, and he could not prove it either way. That is what unpermitted work actually costs, and it is not the fine. When work goes in without permits there is no record of what you did or when you did it — which means there is no record of what you did not do either. Every defect in the building becomes arguably yours, and you have nothing to point at.

Meanwhile: thirty thousand a year in taxes with three years outstanding, no insurance, twenty-four units mostly producing nothing, and a citation file getting longer. There is no version of that a man works his way out of from inside one of the units.

He sold it to us. We are still rebuilding it, which is the honest answer on this one. A twenty-four unit building in that condition does not finish quickly, and it would be a lie to write it up as though it already had.

The house with a tree growing through the living room

This house had been standing empty long enough that people had moved into it, and the police were being called out to the property. The owners wanted to sell, but they could not see a way to get from where they were standing to a closing table.

When we walked the property, there was a tree growing up through the living room. Not a sapling pushing through a crack in the slab — a tree, inside the house, with the roof open above it.

We bought it. The tree was a line on a budget, and the people living there were something we took care of after closing rather than something the owners had to resolve before we would sign a contract.

That is usually the real difference between one cash buyer and another. Not whether they are willing to look at a house in that condition, but whether they expect you to fix it first.