Properties we actually bought. No address and no names — the situation is the point.
A year of probate, and we ran the building while it went through
Seventeen units, and a widow who had ended up responsible for all of it. Her husband had handled the building for years, and when he died the whole thing landed on her. Her children were not in Miami.
She did not feel safe going to the building to collect rent. That is the detail that matters most here, and it is one that rarely gets said out loud. A property can be a perfectly good asset on paper and still be something a person cannot make themselves go to.
Getting it sold meant getting a probate started, and that needed a lawyer. We found her several probate and real estate attorneys to speak to, rather than steering her to ours. Somebody in her position should be choosing her own representation, not accepting whoever the buyer put in front of her, and the cost of giving her a real choice was a couple of phone calls. Then we covered the up-front costs so the legal process could actually begin.
It took about a year to reach a closing. Probate does what probate does.
And during that year, we managed the building for her. Somebody had to, and it was not going to be a woman who did not feel safe walking up to it. We did not own it yet and we were not paid for it. It simply needed doing, and we were the ones in a position to do it.
Twelve units, abandoned, and nobody near it safe
A twelve-unit building, standing empty. It had no certificate of occupancy and could not get one without permits from the city, so legally nobody was supposed to be living in it at all.
People were living in it. Squatters had moved into an abandoned building with the utilities cut off, which is worse than it sounds. No water and no power in an occupied building is not an inconvenience — it is how fires get started for heat and light, and how somebody gets hurt with nobody there to notice. It was a dangerous situation for the people inside it and for everybody around it.
And the list of what needed doing was enormous. The permits. The certificate of occupancy. The people. The utilities. Then the building itself, which had been left alone long enough to show it.
We took all of it on.
An abandoned building is not a neutral thing quietly sitting there. It gets worse every month and it takes part of the block with it, and the owner usually knows that better than anyone. Most of the people we buy these from are not indifferent. They can see exactly what is happening and have no way to stop it from where they are standing.
A boarding house where nobody knew who lived there
Seventeen rooms, in complete disrepair, full of people on day-to-day tenancies.
Nobody had a clear picture of who was actually living in it. Day-to-day means somebody can be in a room for a fortnight and gone before you learn their name, with the next person in by the weekend. There is no lease to look at and no list that stays accurate for long.
That makes the ordinary business of owning a building close to impossible. You cannot collect rent reliably from people you cannot identify. You cannot plan repairs around rooms you are not certain are occupied. You cannot say with any confidence how many people are in the building on a given night.
We bought it in that state, and we will be honest about the rest: it was hard work. Not hard to buy — hard to run. We knew what we were taking on and it was still a job.
Which is worth saying plainly, because if you own a property like this and feel you have lost control of it, you have not been careless. Buildings run this way are genuinely difficult to manage, and they get away from people far more capable than they give themselves credit for. Selling one is not an admission of anything.
