From Possible Flip to Five Home Development

As we stood in the living rooming of a split level home in the middle of a 6 acre tract of land, my business partner's voice rang out, " the best thing we can do to this house is drive our front end loader through it and put a neighborhood in." 

I had spotted this place on MLS a month or so before, and after a price drop we decided to ride out and take a look at it for a possible flip.  The house was in bad shape and functionally obsolete, which we expected.  What we didn't expect was for the land to lay so well and be filled with mature hardwoods.  In this area it is almost impossible to find tracts of land like this, and what was even better was that there was an adjacent neighborhood that was an excellent case study for developing this land.  Not to mention that the land was directly across from a great county park and within 1 mile of the highest rated school in the county.

The conversation in that living room now turned to how we could unlock the land's potential.  For the new construction portion of our business, we are always on the lookout for quality lots, and they are usually in short supply.  We had never developed our own lots, but here was our chance to create multiple high quality lots at what we estimated would be a significant discount to market rates.  

The conversation quickly turned to topics like what about zoning,  what's the permitting process to demo a house, how do we break this land up into lots, etc.  These were all legitimate questions that we didn't have exact answers to, but what we did know was that we could find the answers.  We also knew that doing a project like this would be extremely beneficial to us in the long run.

After our offer was accepted, we poured over the details and made sure we had all of our bases covered.  After reviewing the quotes to demo the house, we decided to purchase the additional equipment we needed to do the demo ourselves (it helps to have a partner that spent  over 10 years in the grading business).  

A tractor, dump trailer, and heavy equipment trailer later, and we were ready to roll.  Now I wouldn't just go out and buy equipment like this for one job.  We have intentions to use this in our new construction business as well as expand our grading/demo offerings to customers.

We are wrapping up the demo now and about to start working on the development.  When we headed over to first look at this property we could not have guessed we would end up where we are today, but we look for value wherever we can find it and this one happened to lean toward our skill set.