For those of you who haven’t yet heard, I have a Santa Cruz Fixer-Upper e-mail list. People who are looking for fixer-upper properties here in Santa Cruz County can subscribe to this list, and every week or so they’ll receive a group of listings via e-mail that look to me like they have good upside potential – that is, the buyer can quickly add value to the property by making repairs and other improvements. All kinds of properties go out on this list – condos, multi-residential properties, single-family residences…anything except for raw land. I have a separate list – Hot Land Deals in Santa Cruz – for that.
A couple of weeks ago, I put out a property on the fixer upper list that seemed like an incredible deal (aren’t they all? 🙂 ). I was working some floor shifts after I sent the listing out, and I was getting a lot of calls on this property. Again, I was struck by what an awesome value proposition the property had.
The property in question was a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house on a 34,000 square foot lot. The exciting part is that the area is zoned for 6,000 square foot parcels. In theory, this one property could be split into 4 separate properties. If a build-able lot in that part of Santa Cruz county is worth somewhere between $300K and $350K…that’s $1 million or so for the three other lots, plus you can sell off the original house for pretty close to what you would pay for it.
And of course, once the lots were split, there were more possibilities: build houses on them, then sell the houses? Or, build houses with “granny units” on them, and sell them for much more? Add on a granny unit to the original house? This parcel presented tremendous opportunity for some lucky buyer!
A few days after I put notice about this property out on the fixer-upper list, I couldn’t stand it anymore – this one was just too good to let is pass by. I put in an offer on this property with a business partner, and it was accepted! That was a couple of weeks ago. Interested to hear what happened? Stay tuned to the blog…I’ll tell you more about it in the next posting!
Live by the Beach
