“There’s no saving this one,” says Mark Krajewski of Colorado House Buyers, standing next to a decayed 126-year-old house in west Highland that the firm bought last month through a real estate agent. Colorado House Buyers, who are real estate investors, offered the sellers a check for $425,000, and this month it’ll be bulldozed and then rebuilt.
“We always prefer to update the existing house when we purchase, but in this case it can’t be restored,” Krajewski adds.
The decision for that seller was clear, he notes: Brick walls were cracked and the brick foundation was buckling under pressure. No great looker to begin with, the house offered around 2,000 square feet of finished space. And when Colorado House Buyers replaces it with a new home sized for a popular neighborhood, that one will be 5,000 square feet and probably go for $1.2 or $1.3 million.
But in other cases, the decision whether to call in a firm like Colorado House Buyers or to list on the conventional market is more nuanced.
“The question to ask is whether a house is in good enough condition that with some minimum fixup, it’ll be ready to move in,” says builder Adam McCanna.
If major maintenance has been deferred, even if a home is relatively attractive on the outside, it still may be less expensive to do a substantial makeover — replacing interior walls and systems, and maybe adding height to the basement — well beyond what average sellers will want to take on.
McCanna and Krajewski help buyers and their agents make decisions like that all the time.
“We bring in the comps to show recent area sales in three basic ranges — from perfect to marginal to poor condition,” Krajewski says. “We tell buyers whether this is right for us, or whether itap not a good fit and that they’d be better off listing it for sale on the MLS.”
Owners who have followed sales in their neighborhoods sometimes get the wrong message from recent contract prices, McCanna notes.
The company is on track this year to buy 40 homes for remodeling or rebuilding, often from Park Hill (“My favorite,” McCanna says), Mayfair, Highland, Berkeley and Wash Park — areas where the stock is aged. But some sales come from newer areas — Arvada, Englewood and south Denver, where homes circa 1960 or 1970, even after minor fixups, may fail to move the needle with buyers.
“Buyers these days, particularly younger ones, aren’t looking for problems; a lot of them would rather have brand new,” he adds.
Once a seller decides to go the route of selling to an investment company like Colorado House Buyers, the process becomes faster and simpler than a sale via a listing, Krajewski notes. There are no inspections, no belated requests for repairs.
One seller asked McCanna whether she should have a lawyer examine the agreement. He sent her a standard Colorado sales contract for her attorney to look over but added there’s not much to go wrong on one of these. Sellers give up the house as-is and get a cashier’s check, overseen by escrow and a title company to protect both sides.
Not surprisingly, some recent sales to Colorado House Buyers have come via real estate agents, who’ve looked at the numbers and decided itap the logical route for their seller.
McCanna and Krajewski will get back to you in as little as 48 hours with an assessment of your home’s worth. Call 303-242-4621 or email adam@cohousebuyersllc.com or mark@cohousebuyersllc.com.
The news and editorial staffs of The Denver Post had no role in this postap preparation.