HELP! ARV - LOCAL REALTORS HAVE ZERO CONFIDENCE IT WILL APPRAISE

[Jake Drappi]

Happy New Year BP community!

I wish everyone a healthy and wealthy new year! I have my first property under contract as of Friday, and as I started digging deeper, I am starting to get a bit worried and wanted to see if I can find some guidance. This property was listed for 100K and is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath on an acre of land in Vineland NJ. It is not a high crime area, but overall lower income. The comps I looked at in the area were all over the place price wise, but I believed this one to be a pretty good deal, but it did need some work. I believe the ARV will be around 150K and the rehab will be about 25K based on the comps my realtor sent me and what I've found online. I also reached out to some seasoned realtors in the area to ask their opinions and both of their responses were pretty alarming, and I am not sure if it was because they are not looking at this through the lens of an investor or because they know the area so well. Basically, they both stated that fixing the house up and using higher quality materials will not increase the value much at all. The only benefit, in their opinion, was that I would get a higher quality tenant that would not cause as many problems. I was looking for forced appreciation here, but according to these 2 realtors (whom I contacted separately and do not work together) spending the money I was going to to fix this up will only raise the value by a few thousand to roughly 5K. These are both realtors I find on Zillow Agents who had a lot of reviews and sales from what I found. Putting 25k-30k into a property to only raise the value by 5K is not something I would want to do. Could they be right or do you think this is something that they do not understand? This is a property I was planning on holding on to for high cash flow, but I would be just throwing money away if they are correct.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!