Purchasing An Abandoned Mansion

Ok – so we technically bought this house in February! And closed in April. But I am very behind on blogs so here it is better late than never!

This house was an AMAZING find. And I can’t express how lucky I feel to be the one who get’s to restore it. It’s incredible.

Let me explain how I found this house in the first place…

How We Bought It

Dylan and I are always looking for investment properties – that’s what we do! So we always keep any eye out. And we do specialize in older homes. But this home is located in an area that we weren’t activity looking, so I didn’t find it the day it went live.

I woke up on a Monday morning in February to seeing posts on my Facebook feed about this old abandoned home in Norfolk County. The photos looked amazing! So I asked for the address of the house. Pulled up the listing on MLS, and saw the they were presenting offers on the home THAT DAY at 1pm! So I dropped every, scheduled a showing, and drove to Norfolk County to see this home. 

It was love at first site. Oh it was in a state…and there wasn’t much left to the house except the bones…but the bones were good, great even! This home was built in 1880, and had a very solid stone foundation, you could feel how solid the house was. And as I walked around the home (by myself) I could tell the home wanted to be saved. It was longing to be brought back to it’s former glory. It was so easy for me to see the potential in this home, I almost immediately knew the layout, the style, and the plan on how I would bring this home back to life.

Now I just had to GET IT! Remember…they were holding off offers…

So I rushed home, spent a couple hours researching the  Norfolk County market to pull comps and determine an ARV, what would our reno budget be? What would our reno timeline be? Etc.

So the time came, 1pm, and I submitted our highest and best offer on the property and then just had to WAIT. There was some tough competition – we were competing with several other investors for this property. Some wanted to tear the house down and put up an apartment building, others wanted to turn the home into multi-family and sever the lot and build another multi-family next door.

When Dylan got home from work that day I shared the news that I had found this house and offered on it (he had no idea! haha). I showed him the video I had taken while there, and he got just as excited as I was about the home.

This may have been one of the longest days of my life! We got a call back at 10:30 that night saying WE WON! OMG! It really happened!