What’s up, everyone? Chris Kennedy here with Mayfair Real Estate in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and I’m right here in front of a deal we took down just a couple of months ago. I’m really excited because it was a great deal. You can take a look here. It’s five duplexes on contiguous slots and it’s pretty neat. What happened here was, I’m friends with another broker in town. He had a client who was actually trying to buy the property and the client came, took a look, did their inspections, and decided they were a little scared of taking down the property. So my friend called me and said, “Hey, Chris, this looks like a deal that might make sense to you. Are you interested?” So we took their place in the contract and closed on it in a couple of weeks. And taking a look around, you can see it’s in pretty rough shape, but there’s a lot of potential here.
So, like I said, it’s five duplexes, five contiguous lots. We’ve got four three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartments, and six two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartments. In short, it’s a great deal. I’ll go into some of the numbers when I get back in the office and share them with you guys, but check it out.
So there are a few things that we liked about this property. And as you can see behind me, it’s in pretty rough shape right now. But if you want to follow me, I’ll just kind of walk you through the deal a little bit. The deal itself included five properties or five buildings. This one right behind me and the next four. So it’s actually five adjacent lots, five duplexes, a total of 10 apartments. And if you look at the buildings, you can actually see they’re a pretty good size. So those apartments are large. We had four three-bedroom, two bathroom apartments and six two-bedroom, one bathroom apartments. So although the condition of the property is not so great, it has a lot of potential.
There are lots of things that we need to do at this property. We already actually started working on some things, including getting rid of a lot of the bulk trash. The property when we picked it up was actually just full of a lot of junk. We’ve already pulled a lot of that out of here. Also, the landscaping was super overgrown and take a look here, we’ve trimmed back a lot of the trees from against the building. Those are things we need to do right away. We want to prevent any rodents getting into the property or prevent termites getting in there. So, easy fix. We went ahead and cleaned up some of the landscaping already, and we’ll go into some detail on a couple of other items right now.
So as I was telling you, one of the first things that we’ve done here is to really cut back the trees at the property. And the reason we do that is a couple of things. Number one, it prevents rodents and pests getting into the property. It gives them a route to get up onto the roof and get into any holes that they may find. But also when landscaping and shrubs and trees aren’t kept back from the roof line, you start having rotting fascia and other issues, and here can see the fascia is in pretty bad shape, the fascias part of the roof system. And when it’s not maintained, well, obviously it creates, this is water damage and you’ve probably got some termite damage there as well. When it’s not maintained right, then you’ll create holes in the property and into the roof and you start having problems with water penetration, and also pest infestation.
All right. So another easy way to fix this property relatively quickly and at a pretty limited expense or cost to us as investors is to go ahead and paint the buildings. This is something that’s really impactful. It’s immediately obvious to potential new residents here and obviously the residents who are here already, that we’ve taken actions towards fixing the building, improving the property and making it a better place for people to live. So painting a building fresh when you take over management or you purchase it is one of the best ways to drive up the value and attract new, good residents right away.