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How to sell your handyman special in Richmond Virginia

You want to sell your handyman special.

Your house is ugly.

Your house is out of date.

Your house needs more repairs than you care to imagine.

Perhaps you have smoked in the house and the walls are stained.

Perhaps you had really old pet who has soiled the flooring so bad that guests won’t enter your house.

Maybe the rotten bathroom floor has finally caved in from rot and you can’t even enter your bathroom.

I buy handyman specials.

I buy those types of houses.

I want to buy your handyman special.

I can close on a date of your choice, usually in as little as two weeks.

A recent handyman special

We Buy Handyman Specials

Last week, I closed on the purchase of  a handyman special.

I found it on the MLS and it was over 60 days on market.

The sellers were anxious to sell.

A vacant house can attract all sorts of problems and headaches for an absent owner.  (Including bullet holes).

If your handyman special sits too long, it will attract vandals.  That is what happened with this property in a decent working class neighborhood.

All of the replacement windows got shot out or broken.

Storm doors were destroyed.

I’ve had frozen pipes burst, gutters stolen, and even found a homeless man sleeping in the living room of the vacant house.

It was a handyman special

Because of it’s condition, it took me nearly two weeks to have the property inspected and form a budget for fixing it.  I couldn’t close on it in less than three weeks, mostly because of the time I needed to look at the scope of repairs.

The windows had been broken by vandals.

The house had been boarded up.

The storm doors had fallen off.

Light fixtures had been stolen.

The kitchen needed to be redone.

The two bathrooms needed complete makeovers.

All told, the amount of repairs on this house will approach nearly $45,000 dollars over the next 6-8 weeks.

What you need to do to get a fast offer on your handyman special

I buy handyman special houses.

The amount of repairs needed doesn’t really matter to me as long as that budget fits the formulas I use in my pricing.

If you want a fast offer on your handyman special, please call me directly at 804-719-1489 during normal business hours on the east coast.

How I made a Fast Offer on a Handyman Special

One of my ads for buying handyman specials caught the attention of a realtor who gave me a call with a house she swore she couldn’t sell.

I answer my own phone (unlike other We Buys Houses Fast companies).    The agent told me that her seller just wanted to get rid  of the house.

I made a fast offer of the handyman special.

We followed a pretty good process:

1.  We talked about the handyman property in its current condition.

2.  We talked about expected repairs that the realtor knew about.

3.  I ran the expected numbers through my formulas and found a price that worked for the seller and myself.

4.  I put house under contract with a 14 day inspection period and had signatures within 24 hours.

5.  I had the house inspected for repairs and to confirm the repair budget.

I made the offer on the house based on numbers and expected condition.  If you want to sell your house fast, we can follow a similar process based on expected repairs.

Fast Offer on Handyman Fixers

My Fast Offer for that house wouldn’t work.

Here is where it became impossible for me to buy this handyman special.

The inspections revealed all sorts of defects that the real estate agent didn’t know.

  • A 200 ft2 addition was added to the house without a permit.
  • The foundation of the addition was built on piers.
  • Siding and boards on the side of the house were touching the ground and rotting.
  • The electrical panel, installed outside, was not weather proofed and installed upside down.
  • Illegal (not to code) roof repairs required a complete roof replacement.
  • The kitchen floor slopped in two directions and could only be fixed from above (no crawlspace) by ripping out the existing tile floor and replacing it.

Many estimates of repair were exceeding 30,000 and one estimate went as high as 80,000 to fix.

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In this case, the seller hadn’t told the realtor of all the problems, and the realtor had no clue of the amount of repairs.

With the amount of repairs exceeding the amount in my calculations, we agreed to part ways.  The seller had no room to cut the price because of a loan on the house.

If you are a seller and want to sell your house fast, you need to be realistic about the amount of repairs.  In this case, I was unable to buy this handyman special, even though they got our offer fast.

What you need to do to get a fast offer on your handyman special

I do buy handyman special houses.

The amount of repairs needed doesn’t really matter to me as long as that budget fits the formulas I use in my pricing.

In order to have finished with the agreement to purchase this house, the price would have needed to go down another 30,000 to allow it to fit into my formulas.  This would allow for extreme circumstances if the un-permited section had to be torn and rebuilt.

If you want a fast offer on your handyman special, please call me directly at 804-719-1489 during normal business hours on the east coast.

Or fill out the form below.

Get an offer

I Want to Sell My Handyman Special in Richmond

If you’ve got a handyman special that you want to sell, I’d be interested in buying it.

In this video, you’ll see some of the handyman specials I’ve been involved in:

The three sided house is my favorite photo of a handyman special.

I almost bought it, but a snag in the title work kept the seller from selling their ugly fixer upper to me.

The amount of repairs needed will be calculated in my offer to you to buy your house.  But the amount of repairs doesn’t bother me.

I’ve had to jack up houses, replace joists, straighten out sinking houses, and even had all the wiring and plumbing replaced.

If you want to sell your handyman special, I’d be happy to make you an offer.

You can turn your house into cash in just a few days.

Get an offer

Evaluate Your Own Rehab Budget

If your house needs a lot of repairs, you may be horrifically surprised at the cost of those repairs.  Most sellers I speak to have no idea how to estimate repairs or form a realistic rehab budget.

Not too long ago, I visited the house of  seller whose house had not been updated since the early 1940s.

When we visited the house, our renovation estimate to bring the house to the current FHA standards was nearly $80,000.  The seller’s best guess was $15,000.

Clearly, we didn’t see the same amount of repairs.

How not to be deceived on the rehab budget.

You might feel that the real estate investor is blowing smoke when it comes to a rehab budget.

Here is how not to be deceived.

Get your own contractor estimates.

I have often told homeowners that to understand the nature of the repairs needed to their handyman house, they will need to get their own estimates of repairs.

If you want to know for sure that the real estate investor is giving you a realistic rehab number that they are calcuating, then go and get your own price for rehabbing your house.

I found this little video that shows how you could potentially talk with a contractor to help you get that rehab budget.

Make sure a real estate investor’s estimate of rehab is in line with contractor estimates.

That will give you the confidence to know that you will be treated fairly by the investor who is offering to buy your house.

To help yourself understand the rehab budget, get your own contractor estimates.

An experienced investor will know a rehab budget

If you wish to sell your handyman special to an investor, they will calculate a rehab budget into their offer price.

An experienced investor will know a good rehab budget, whereas an inexperienced investor will likely make a guess and guess wrong.

If your rehab budget is beyond your ability

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If you find that your rehab budget to fix your handyman special is way too far out of reach for you, we’d be interested in buying it.

We promise that we will give you a fair price for your handyman special as is.

Our team has been buying handyman specials since 2004 and we have a pretty good knack for determining a realistic rehab budget that will influence our offer price to you.

Call me during normal business hours or fill out the form here and I will give you a call

Get an offer