Properties we actually bought. No address and no names — the situation is the point.
Priced where it could not sell, and it sat
This one had already been through probate. The estate was settled, the heirs could sell, and there was nothing legal standing in the way. It still did not sell, and that is worth explaining because it happens constantly.
It had been listed, and it had been listed too high. That is not a small mistake. A number set above what a house will actually bring does not just fail to attract a buyer — it sets everybody's expectations in the wrong place, and every week the house sits, the family is measuring every offer against a figure that was never real. Then the listing goes stale, and buyers start reading the days-on-market as though something is wrong with the house rather than with the price.
We are licensed brokers ourselves, so this is said carefully: winning a listing by promising the highest number is a good way to get hired and a bad way to sell a house. The seller pays for it in months.
What we did was ordinary. We looked at it, made a fair cash offer against what the house was actually worth in the condition it was in, and closed in twenty days. No repairs asked for, no financing to fall through, no second and third price reduction. Everybody was satisfied, which is the whole measure of whether a number was fair.
Then we gutted it. The barrel tile came off, the awnings came off, the driveway was poured new, and the house has just been finished. It is a good house again, and somebody is going to live in it.
One heir was living in it, and the others needed it sold
The family had inherited this house, and one of them was living in it with her own family. That is a good outcome on paper and a difficult one in practice, because the house needed work on a scale that was not within reach, and the work was not the kind that waits.
The rest of the family were owed their share. That is not a hostile position and it is worth saying plainly, because inherited houses get talked about as if somebody in them must be behaving badly. Nobody was. Their money was sitting in a building they did not live in, and the only ways it comes out are a buy-out or a sale. A buy-out was not going to happen, so a sale was the answer everybody could actually reach.
What we could do was make it land gently. We closed on their timeline rather than ours, and they had time in the house after closing - which matters more than it sounds when the house you are leaving is also the house you grew up in.
Then we found out what we had bought. The floor joists had to be replaced. So did the roof. The central air had to be moved. We put in impact windows, rebuilt all three bathrooms, and took out the wall between the kitchen and the living room - which opened the space up and, more to the point, let the light through the house instead of stopping it at a partition.
The coral rock around the front door stayed. It was broken in places and it would have been quicker to render straight over it, but it is the reason the house looks like it belongs on that street. You can see it in the photographs above - the same doorway, before and after.
