Sad Houses and a Service Mindset

I still try to live by the words of cultural icon and personal hero John Lennon, who said, “There are no problems, only solutions.” Photo by: Unknown

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2016-03-09.

Hermit House Redevelopment approaches every unique situation with a service mindset. We ask the question, “How can we help,” and we put our mission statement out there on everything we do:

We buy sad houses and make them happy again.

What does that mean? Or as one of our private money lenders put it, “Lee, what the hell is a sad house?”

A sad house is one that is not living up to its true potential. As with people, lots of things can make a house sad. Between the four of us on the Hermit Haus leadership team, we’ve probably seen them all at least once.

It all comes down to how you look at things. There are no opportunities without problems. You can focus on the problem or the solution. Granted, sometimes the solutions require more resources than you have. That’s where we come in. At Hermit Haus Redevelopment, we specialize in finding the resources that enable us to provide solutions.

Without going into too many details, here are a few examples:

Neglect

A couple of our recent projects involved deferred maintenance—repairs that were put off so long that their volume became overwhelming. One house stood vacant for more than a decade. Another was ignored by its owner until there was more wrong with it than he cared to address, even though he had the money to renovate it before he sold it.

In both of these cases, we gave the owners what they wanted: a quick sale without having to go through the trouble of dealing with contractors and hoping they would get the money the spent on renovation back out of the house.

Changing needs

We are currently acquiring a beautiful house, one that I would be happy to move into without doing any renovation whatsoever. The owners tried to sell it once before, but couldn’t get any traction in a down market. Now their needs have changed. and they don’t have time to wait for it to sell, and they were leery of trying given their previous experience.

What the owners of this house wanted most was to be out from under it. Even though we couldn’t give them what the house was worth (at least in their eyes), we could free them from a crushing two-hour commute to work after a job chance and the worry of another failed attempt to sell the house.

From personal experience, I know that if someone I’ve talked to loses their house to foreclosure, I have failed them.

Financial problems and foreclosure

As Carol and I have both mentioned, foreclosure is only the start of a nightmare that can last more than seven years. The consequences of foreclosure can sometimes return decades after the event.

Although we’ve purchased bank-owned houses, we haven’t been as successful in helping people avoid foreclosure as we want. After hearing the saddest sentence in the English language too many times, I’ve made it my mission to help as many people as will let me help them. If someone I’ve talked to loses their house to foreclosure, I have failed them. I obviously haven’t explained how I can help well enough.

Probate

We bought a house Sue Ann and I plan to homestead after it had been tied up in an estate for more than 20 years, vacant for much, if not all, of that time. During all those years, the estate had paid almost $10K each year in real estate taxes and more than $200 each month in HOA fees. I have no idea how much the insurance on the house ran. Luckily, the house was owned free and clear, so the estate didn’t have to make mortgage payments on an empty house. Even so, the estate spent almost $250K maintaining a house nobody wanted to live in. To be fair, there was an easement encroachment that scared off many potential buyers and their banks.

We freed the estate from future expenses on this house and paid cash for the house. In fact, we got the house even though our offer wasn’t the highest because the estate’s attorney realized we would be less likely to back out of the deal than buyers without our experience. Since then, we spent more than a year working with the City of Austin to resolve the easement issue and are in the process of finalizing the renovation so we can move into the house. I know the people moving into this house will be proud of it because they are us and we are proud of all the work.

Sometimes you have to tear something down to make it right again.

Poor workmanship

Another of our current projects involves an almost complete teardown and rebuild. The original owners did things on the cheap without regard to quality. We had to completely jackhammer the foundation and start from scratch. In the process of demolition, we found only three pieces of rebar in the original foundation. We also found electrical runs that were spliced together with electrician’s tape in the walls—a fire waiting to happen.

We bought this house from an estate, thinking that we were helping the heirs divest themselves of a property nobody wanted to manage. Instead, our primary service turns out to be making the house safe for anyone who lives there in the future.

Some people have said it sounds like we’re preying on other people whose problems have gotten the better of them. We’re not, but there are those in this industry who do. We don’t want to be vultures picking at the corpse of failure. We really do approach every deal with a service mindset. There is no Kobayashi Maru. We will buy your house or help you find some other solution. We want you to be as thrilled with the solution you choose as we are.