analyzing home is it worth it?

[Sherwin Vargas]

This may make no sense but I will try my best

my father is in the process of taking over a home of a friend who has missed a ton of payments and let the house go to ****. the reason my father is taking over the home is because he owes him a ton of money and gave him the equity to attempt to pay off the debt. we want to see if the house is worth fixing at all for my dad to try to take some equity out of it or if the headache is even worth it.

The guy owes me father > 80K

HOUSE. due to bank 130k he is allowing him to take over payments. current owner hasn't made payments in over 8 months its in pre foreclosure but bank is willing to do a short sale to my father. we will have to pay 12k in cash for the missed payments and would end up owing 120.

house is in providence ri near broad st. the house needs almost anything you can think of.

we have been in contact with all the tenants we have sent an exterminator to begin the process of dealing with cockroaches, bed bugs, ants, and terminates.

we have electrical issues a lot of the plugs in the house and light sockets do not work. upon having an electrician visit the house he stated that somebody had the electrical updated in the basement but it was not connected to the knob and tube in the house. they began the process of updating the electrical but for an easy way out t hey only did it so it would pass inspection. he said he would have to get into the wall to see exactly the extent of the electrical repair needed.

plumbing is also an issue and within the next year will need all 3 new boilers. the yard has a small parking lot next door but no fence or boundary showing where the property ends. the roof has a couple of years left in it.

yard has to be fixed cleaned and asphalt or cement.

all basement windows need to be changed and fixed.

the interiers are all very dated and would need to be updated as tenants move.

Last, the porch is completely slanted on all floors around a 25 degree angle slope downward. which would all have to be fixed.

my father and I are trying to figure out if its worth it for him to pay the due payments and take over the house for 130 and fix it up. to try to take as much money out of it as possible. or is it worth it to just let the house pass.

my father just does not want to invest a ton of money into this house minimum 12k for missed payments plus fixing everything it needs and then have a huge headache and a ton of work to make a few thousand and a few years. he says if its a lot of investment needed he would rather just let it go and not have to invest 30k to hopefully take out 15 k in a few years.

I just want some additional opinions if he should go for it or back off of it. what you other investors think. the fact that it is fully occupied to makes us feel like the process would be a lot more difficult and time consuming. we also live an hour and a half away and have fulltime job plus 5 other properties.

Let me know if we should move forward with it or back away.

[Anthony Thompson]

Sherwin, it's a little hard to follow the #s here. I guess if it were me, I'd try to understand a few scenarios.

What would the house be worth if you put it on the market today, how much would you (or your dad) have to invest to acquire it, and if you had to sell it on day 1 as-is, doing no work, what would you get back (if anything), or would you lose money. This is the baseline scenario.

Second scenario would be, what would you have to put in not only to acquire it, but also to at least stabilize the property and make it a bare minimum acceptable quality - for example, fix the pest issues as best as possible, fix the electrical issues, etc. This doesn't mean "making it a great property" this means "making it acceptable so that there are no glaring risks or big problems that would stick out to a potential buyer". Again, you'd want to look into how much to acquire, how much to bring it up to that level, and then what you could get for it if you put it on the market at that point (which would involve paying off any mortgage of course - what you'd get "at the end of the day").

The final scenario, one you probably don't want to get into but is worth thinking about, is what would you have to put into the property to acquire and bring it up to a reasonable quality level, to actually make it a "good property". Obviously that's the biggest investment scenario, and you'd want to similarly understand what you'd be able to get for all your hard work.

Chances are this last one isn't the maximum profit scenario (if any scenario has a profit), only because I find doing things "right" is rarely paid back fully to an appreciative buyer - the main benefit from doing things right is if you keep a property long enough to benefit from those decisions.

There's also the scenario of holding onto it, but it doesn't sound like that's really what you'd be wanting to do for geographical and other situational reasons here.

My basic thought is, if you don't see a way to make at least $10,000 in the first scenario (acquire and sell as-is), strongly consider just passing. But if you are up for a bit of a project then maybe the second scenario (fix the glaring issues and put it on the market) is more appealing, in which case I'd say if you could make $20,000 then maybe it's worth it - only you can decide the "minimum profit for the required aggravation" level for yourself of course.

There are probably other, more creative ways to look at this. For example if you think there's a little money being left on the table but not enough for you to do a project with the property long-distance, with everything else you have going on, you could wholesale it to someone more local (in RI or Providence), walk away with a little $ and let someone else deal with the aggravation.

I still don't have a sense of what the house would be worth, the top line number, so this is all just theoretical, but hopefully some of those ideas will help you and your dad think about it. Good luck and let us know how it works out of course!