All Forum Posts by: Denis Boyda

Hi @David Zimmer, I couldn't get a real estate attorney who could give me advice with arguments. I think the building department found it weird that I want to make a sink in one of the bedrooms on the second floor. It's more common that people to make sinks in the basement. I could probably push on it arguing that I want to make a laundry room upstairs but I didn't. I will ask again about the sink on the second floor when apply for a permit and let you know.

As for zoning, I did not find a way how to do STR in zoning where it's not allowed. My plan is to do MTR there.

Thank you for your response, Brian. I agree that this research is just a superficial view of different MA markets and more detailed economical research should be done. I agree that Job Growth is another good metric to consider. I could add this metric later and see which conclusions regarding the Worcester market it supports.

I am doing Sub2 bootcamp now and we had a task to analyze the population of the backyard market. I didn't find data in a form I like so I pulled out data from the census and did my own research. The goal of the research is to find promising markets - cities with large populations which growing. Pace considered markets with year population growth >= 0.8% as good markets. I did an analysis for the largest cities in MA and present it here. My script is available by the link below so you can play with it and present data as you want.

I used data sets

* https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2010-2020/cities/SUB-EST2020_25.csv

* https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2022/cities/totals/sub-est2022_25.csv

This is a link to my notebook

* https://colab.research.google....

Data 2010 - 2020

I filtered out MA cities with small populations and left only cities having populations larger than 80k in 2012. There are only 11 such cities. I plotted population growth by years, and I found:

* Boston and Cambridge are the only cities having a population growth of more than 1% per year. The trend for Boston is that population growth decreases s.t. in 2012 it had a growth of about 2% but in 2018 it became smaller than 1%. Cambridge has had large fluctuations of population growth over the years but I would say on average it has growth 1%.

* Majority of cities had a population growth of about 0.5% in the first half of the 2010s

* All cities have a trend of decreasing population growth

* Springfield had a small growth in the first half of 2010s (population is 154620 people in 2015) and in the second half of 2010s, its population declined (population 152646 in 2020).

* In 2018 population in Newton City and Lower City started to decline. These sites together with Springfield are the only ones with a declining population this year which seems to be the start of the new trend. There are not enough data though to argue it clearly.

* In 2020, the middle of the online era, most of the cities had declining or small growing (Cambridge, Fall River, and New Bedford) populations.

Data 2020-2022

In this data set census changed methodology so comparing this data set with the previous one is not straightforward and could lead to misleading results. That is why I don't have data points for 2020 and don't plot both data on the same figure.

For this dataset, I considered MA cities with populations larger than 85k people as I wanted to keep the number of cities small. These are my findings:

* In 2021 almost all cities had a declining population.

* In 2021 the only city that has a growing population is Worcester. It seems people were moving to Worcester from other big cities. The absolute number does not allow us to conclude that people were moved to Worcester from all of MA, as the population in Worcester grew up only by 600 people in 2021. But there is something in this city preventing people from move out (or stimulating other people to move in to compensate those who were leaving)

* In 2022 there are only two cities with a growing population Quincy and Cambridge. Growth is large compared to what these cities had in a pre-pandemic era so I don't think that it's fluctuations rather than new trends. It is not enough data to argue it but I would assume that people started moving back to cities around Boston.

2010-2022

I visited the building department, they told me that it's not possible to convert my SFH to multifamily. I have also asked them about adding a sink, kitchen bar, and fridge on the second floor. They told me that I can not do it without any details. I'm not sure I can simply rely on it and would like to know where there is a line between allowable conversion and not-allowable. What if I put cabinets, can I add a microwave, sink, and fridge? The building department definitely does not want me to add anything to the second floor as could rent it separately. I heard that people who do this kind of project as a formal kitchen should have a stove. Does anyone know if there are some attorneys who specialize in this type of problem and could answer my questions?

@Steven Clevenger, indeed, co-living lease would solve this problem. I didn't know about that, thank you.

I've just checked with a city, and it seems STR is forbidden in the RES A zone of Quincy. There are only a few areas (Res B) with multifamilies where MTR is allowed. And without STR it could be hard to get high occupancy rates in MTRs.

@Kyle Spearin, thank you, Kyle. Jessica's story is inspiring. The amount of rent on her condo that went up is impressive. I thought it was not possible to cash flow with a condo but her example shows that I was wrong. Do you know she is present at BP? I would like to connect with her and ask about MTR.

@Steven Clevenger, thank you for your reply. Is it fine to clean the bathroom only bi-monthly? In MA you have to clean bathrooms every 24 hours if it's shared by different roommates https://www.masslegalhelp.org/.... What service for cleaning do you use?  

Hi Steven, I'm also interested in MTR but on the South shore. Did you find some managing companies?

Hi all. I've just bought 3-bd 2bath SFH. It would perfectly split for a 2-family house: 1-bd on the first floor and 1(or2)-bd and the second floor. Unfortunately, current zoning restrictions do not allow us to convert it to Multi-family. There are some multi-family nearby but they were converted a while ago. The second floor has 3 bedrooms and one bathroom. One of the bedrooms is very small. I am thinking of adding a kitchen bar/cabinets, sink, microwave, and fridge to this small bedroom and using it as a mini-kitchen. After doing this I would like to rent the second floor "by rooms" as MTR. The tenant will have a separate entrance door and three rooms (one converted to a mini-kitchen). It is legal in MA to rent a house by room to 3 tenants or less without a license. The weird thing is that I will rent 3 bedrooms and 1 bath to one person.

I wonder if someone was doing so before and if this is a legal scheme. Can the inspector decide that house was illegally converted to a multi-family even though the second floor does not have a stove and there are no walls separating the two units? There will be some closed and sealed doors on the first floor which will separate units on the first floor from the second floor.

I would highly appreciate your advice and would be happy to talk to an attorney who specializes in this.