Selling a House With Bad Tenants In Little Haiti? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Six units, and an illegal casino in the downstairs one

A six unit multifamily building in Little Haiti, inherited, and the family had no appetite for putting money into it. On its own that is an ordinary position and we hear it constantly. This building had a second thing going on.

There was an illegal casino running out of the downstairs unit. The family did not want to deal with those people, and that is not squeamishness. It is a fair reading of the situation. Whatever you decide to do about an operation like that, you are the one who has to go and do it, and afterwards you are the one they know.

It also rules out the normal route. You cannot market a building like that in the usual way — a listing means disclosure, and it means strangers walking through the property on scheduled afternoons, and whoever was running that unit would have worked out inside a week that something was happening. So the sale was not announced to the building. Tenants are not party to the sale of the property they live in, there was no reason for any of them to be told in advance, and there was one very good reason not to.

Then the part worth being straight about: the man running it was not a problem. He was a nice guy. He knew everybody on that block and everybody knew him, and there was nothing to be gained by making an enemy of him or an example of him. We did not want to give him any trouble either.

So he was given a few months to move his games somewhere else, and he moved them. No incident. Nobody else had to be involved. The thing the sellers had not been willing to walk into turned out to be a conversation and a deadline that nobody thought was unfair — but they had no way of knowing that in advance, and neither did we. That is most of what gets bought in a building like this. Not the certainty that something is bad. The uncertainty about whether it is.

Then it took about a year. We cleared the units one at a time rather than all at once, which matters more than it sounds: a six unit building emptied in one go earns nothing at all while the work runs, and this work did not run quickly. Kitchens and bathrooms throughout. A new roof. Impact windows, which meant pulling permits and then waiting on them.

At the end of it the rents moved to where they made sense for what the units had become. That is the right way round, and it is the part people skip when they talk about raising rents. The rents were not the project. The year was the project.

A duplex she inherited, and a hundred thousand dollars of work before it paid properly

A duplex in Little Haiti, inherited. The front unit was a three bedroom, one bath. The back was a small one bedroom, not much larger than an efficiency. Both were occupied, and each was bringing in $450 a month.

$450 a unit is a long way under what those units should have earned, and the reason was not the tenants and not the neighbourhood. It was the condition. Both units needed complete repairs, and a full rehab — two kitchens, two bathrooms, and everything behind them — was going to run over a hundred thousand dollars.

The woman who inherited it is a nurse. So the project was never a question of deciding to do it. It was six figures up front, then months of running a construction job around a working schedule, on a building earning $450 a unit the entire time the money was going out.

She sold it instead. Set against that, it is not a close call, and it is the same call a lot of people make when a property arrives that they did not plan for and cannot pause their life to fix.

What the building needed, we did after closing. Two kitchens and two bathrooms. A second bathroom added to the front unit, built into what had been a large closet — that is the change that matters most in a three bedroom, because a three-one and a three-two are not the same property and never rent like it. The septic tank had to come out and be replaced. Two new roofs. Air conditioning.

That is what stood between $450 a unit and market rent. Two roofs, a septic system, air conditioning, and four rooms rebuilt from nothing. Of course it also got painted. That was never the part that cost anything.

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