Rehabbing a house in a historic district

[Katlynn Teague]

Good morning Bp! 

I hope everyone had a great weekend! 

Has anyone in here ever rehabbed a house in a historic district? 

Here's the situation:

We recently picked up a property in historic Inman Park, Atlanta. This neighborhood is on FIRE, the average house sells within 13 days with a sales price between 1.1-1.6 million. 

Now here's where it goes south, this house is on the verge of tear-down. However, in Inman Park, there have only ever been two allowed tear-downs in the history of the neighborhood. I reached out to the city and zoning board and they were adamant that the house could be saved. They also mentioned that whoever bought the property could possibly go through a process to try to have the house torn down due to it being a safety concern for the public. That process could take anywhere from eight months to a whole year. The reason we were advocating for the tear-down route is because right now it is cheaper to build than rehab in our market. There is also another problem, the sweet lady who currently lives there has a reverse mortgage on the property. She wants to move to be closer to her family and needs the house to sell at a certain price to pay off the mortgage and purchase her next property with cash so she has no more payments on top of that it needs to happen quickly as she is not in the best shape. 

The whole situation has been extremely difficult to navigate, we have worked with houses in other historic districts before but none of them have been as strict as Inman Park. Does anyone have any advice on how to work with the cards that were given? Have you ever dealt with a historic committee like this before? What would be your route?