Unique Zoning Situation

[Travis Hargreaves]

Hello everyone I have a zoning questions.

I recently looked at a piece of property that has two separate houses (listed as a multifamily) on the same lot and I was told they can only be sold as together. The seller is basing his prices on the comps of houses around him, but none of these comps have two houses on the same parcel of land. I asked the agent if it was possible to split each of the houses and resection the zoning. He said the owner has attempted this, but had no luck. However, I'm not sure how hard the previous owner had tried. My question is has anyone every tried to take one plot of land and split it so they become two separate houses to be sold individually? This would be my exit strategy, with my main strategy buy, rehabbing, and renting. Both houses need an extensive rehab so I would hate to pour money into both and if the time comes to sell I would only have potential buyers base the worth of the house to the properties around them. This would be nothing like the other around because two house exist.  

[Frank Chin]

In my area, it would require a zoning variance which is often very hard to get, mainly because of issues such as lot size. I've looked into doing variances for several properties I have, and in one, the local homeowners association president said "some people try very hard to get variances, and we try even harder to oppose them". I asked him why, and he said "you make an exception for one guy, you have to do it for everyone else". In fact, when I had expeditors work on variances, they look into it and tell me, "it's OK, several of them had been granted". Sounds like you don't have similar cases in your area.

To tell you how ridiculous it is, a Mercedes dealer tried to have a parking lot across the street from him on a empty lot he owns, which happens to be in a residential zone. He tried for 30 years, even inviting local neighbors over for coffee where I went to one, pitch to neighbors, but the zoning board turned it down. He did it more than once. Did he try hard enough? Should he buy us all gourmet dinners instead? It's still an empty lot.

One solution is to establish a 2 unit HOA and sell them as condos, though you might have operational issues with 2 unit condos. But it appears the 2 houses are on it's separate lot, so the two condo owners would be in charge of it's own maintenance, the main source of conflict for 2 unit condos. So the only common charge is property taxes if it's taxed as one lot.