DBNR investment group’s current project - buying and flipping distressed properties - always had a bit of a grab-bag aspect to it. The idea was always to gather up properties (33 of them in 14 states), extract them from the balance sheets of overwhelmed lenders, and sell them to interested and committed buyers. We never had any control of the what and the where, which has yielded some interesting treasures and potential troubles.
Cleveland, Ohio 
We have an old, gabled house sitting on a 6,000 square-foot lot on Church Street in Cleveland. The house is white with vinyl siding, the kind of place that’s common in the Midwest. I got a call from a carpenter who’s interested in the property because it reminds him of the home he grew up in. He had an accent straight out of the movie Fargo, in which he unexpectedly asked me about the second house.
I wondered, What second house? We only received title to one address, but he said there were two houses on the lot and that both had address numbers. We each did some research and determined that not only did the local zoning rules allow for second houses, but it was a common practice to build second homes for an older family member. The second house’s address numbers - which apparently were unofficial - may have been added to keep the mail straight between the two houses. But that was a clear bonus.
Syracuse, New York 
We were under the impression that only single-family homes were part of the packages. But when I looked at the picture of the property on McClennan Avenue in Syracuse, I realized it was actually a four-plex. A call from a woman whose boyfriend does fix-up work confirmed this. It needs sheet rock, flooring, and water heaters in the units, but we only paid $4,300 for it, and multiple units almost always have more value than a single-family home. Another surprise bonus.
Clearbrook, Minnesota 
Not all of the surprises have been pleasant, I have to say. One of our properties in Clearbrook, Minnesota looks like a barn that was converted to a house. It’s painted a bilious shade of pink. As if that weren’t challenging enough, we got a call from a neighbor insisting that the structure has been mooching off of his utilities and there’s no easement on his land. Any sale is going to have to involve paying him something, he insisted. Interestingly, though, he said he’d be willing to take the property off our hands, cheap. We’re going to have to hire a surveyor and maybe a lawyer on the ground there to hash out the facts. Or, we may just sell it to him, after all, it appears to be 29 miles from nowhere. . .
All in all, we’re finding that, if nothing else, it’s a big, diverse country out there. Some of the accents of people who are calling are so thick, we have to listen to the messages two or three times before we understand them. The ease with which that second house was built in Cleveland and the pink barn was built in Clearbrook presents a strong contrast to the difficulty entailed here in Silicon Valley of building a second structure on a property. I’m finding that there may be much easier places to live than here in California when it comes to real estate.
I’m also meeting lots of motivated people, and enjoying the surprises along the way - well, most of them. . .
