Livin' La Vida Luna y Luca
We went to the Bronx Zoo with our cousins on Labor Day. Definitely hit the step count.
Introducing Project Lewis 🏡
We first caught wind of this deal on Friday, August 28th.
An agent brought it to us, but they weren't direct-to-seller. There was a middleman involved.
If there were ever a time to use the phrase, "Too many cooks in the kitchen..." this was it.
We spent all of the following week trying to work through the middleman, but we weren't getting anywhere. If anything, we were making negative progress.
Once the deal was all but dead, our agent took it upon himself to reach out to the seller directly and locked it up for us.
The kicker: we're closing in 9 days! 😅
The Numbers:
Let's quickly run through the numbers.
We'll start with three buckets of expenses and end with our expected After Repair Value.
Acquisition Costs:
We're paying $800K for the home plus another $35K in acquisition fees, bringing our entry basis to $835K.
Cost to Build & Carry:
The maximum principal building footprint is 1,800sf. Given the existing home has a sideloaded garage ~below grade, we're going to try to do the same with the new structure.
We'll have 3,600sf of livable between first and second, plus another 1,300sf livable in the basement (1,800-500sf 2-car garage).
I'm underwriting the hold to 12 months, which is aggressive considering we have virtually no time to get ahead between going under contract and purchase.
Cost to Sell:
This town charges a higher COAH fee than others. Hopefully, we sell pre-construction to save on staging and holding costs.
After Repair Value:
This house sits in a small pocket of the R-2 zone north of the main street running through town. Otherwise, we're surrounded by R-3 (higher density) or Open Space Government Use.
Comps
These comps are from last summer, but they belong to the same R-2 pocket as us. They're not new, but they're on slightly larger lots. Our bed + bath count will be similar.
We're underwriting our sale to $2.295M, which I think is pretty conservative.
What's Next?
We're waiting to receive our tank sweep results and survey.
Then we can work on developing our floorplan and elevations before closing next week.
The next couple days will be an administrative sprint between creating the project-level LLC, opening the bank account, and sourcing funding, but I'm not concerned.
The systems are in place. Just gotta check boxes a little quicker.
✌🏽&❤️