Getting your player ready...
Last year, when developers Matina Soutsos and Steve Snyder gutted some century-old apartments beside Curtis Park and turned them into townhomes, they sold out immediately. “We could have sold the last one nine times over,” Snyder says. Today the pair are giving downtown buyers another shot at Curtis Park, with four restored townhouses – each of them remodeled from top-to-bottom, marketed at $225,000 each.
You can tour all four, including a furnished model, at 720-734 31st Street, a block east of the park and a half block west of Light Rail, a 12-block walk from downtown. Soutsos and Snyder finished the first four of the 8-home project for Halloween weekend, and sold all.
“The people that are moving here are coming out of rentals in LoDo,” said Snyder, broker/owner of Ridgemoor Realty, showing off a private fenced patio that each home gets – a nice upgrade for a dog that’s been stuck in apartment life for the past couple of years. “None of them had a backyard before,” he added. “They were paying $1,800 a month in LoDo; here they’re dropping $500 to own the place.”
These were gutted to the original brick (no easy job with historic preservation guidelines that require leaving the streetscape intact) — totally new plumbing, interior walls, electrical, windows, doors, hardwood floors, roofing, central air – even some new structural steel that Soutsos and Snyder have left exposed, like the brick, for a loft effect. “It’s a LoDo style without the LoDo price,” Snyder quips.
The $225,000 delivers 940 square feet, with an angled living room that has built-in media niches, opening to a kitchen and nook area with finishes way, way beyond the price: stainless appliances, slab granite bar, Euro-style cabinets and decorator lighting. The powder bath on the main has a clear-glass vessel sink on rough-edged granite that looks like it’s out of a custom flat; and upstairs bedrooms share another lavish bath, along with an upstairs laundry.
Each also has basement storage — and no HOA dues. These are larger than the flats Soutsos and Snyder did across the park – but they share the financing options for qualified buyers that helped make the other project a sell-out; including a Key Bank program at $500 down, no PMI, at a 30-year fixed rate. There are FHA loans coupled with CHFA programs at $1,200 down; and a Compass Bank program designed for attorneys, doctors, dentists, and CPAs that could have you in, right out of school, no money down. Take one-way Stout north from downtown, 10 blocks past Broadway to the corner of 31st. And ask about some single-level homes the pair is completing nearby, from $179,000.
WHEN: Today, 11 a.m. until 4 p.m.
PHONE: 303-520-9000 WEB: www.72031st.com
Mark Samuelson is president of Samuelson & Associates, a homebuilding/real estate communications firm. You can e-mail him at mark@samuelsonassoc.com.
