East Austin Spec Duplex

[Jon Klaus]

Last year I bought a house on a corner lot one mile east of the Texas state capital building. An agent brought it to me before it was about to be listed. The seller was asking 250K so I wrote up an offer for that amount.  However, other agents were shopping the deal too, so I had to raise my offer to 270K to get it under contract.

I wasn't so interested in the house as I was in the lot.  It's a corner lot, about 10,000 SF close to downtown and the University of Texas.  270K was too much to pay for a lot if I could only build one house, but the numbers seemed to make sense if we could build a duplex.  The plan was to build a two family house, and to sell the units separately to owner occupants.

The most obvious challenge with this lot were the two heritage trees (Pecan and Elm) growing in the yard.  The city has strict restrictions about new construction close to protected heritage trees, and if we demolished this house to do new construction, we were going to be very limited in what we could build. Because of this, we decided to keep the foundation and footprint of the old house, a 1950's rancher, and use it as the basis for our new duplex. Here's what it looked like before we started.