This past Saturday morning I did our final walk through for a home we’re purchasing in Detroit. This is actually the first house I ever walked through, the first one we put an offer through, but it will be the second to close. The sellers are from France, so we’ve had a heck of a time getting all the paperwork done to wrap it up. Apparently the Embassy is involved on the other end.
But I digress.
Since it’s been so long we wanted to walk through the house again to make sure nothing has changed. As my agent and I did checked out the home we noticed something we hadn’t before. The house had five bedrooms, not four.
It was listed on the MLS as having four bedrooms, and we hadn’t noticed previously that it had five. That may seem crazy, but again, this is a different ballgame.
When you walk through a $50,000 Detroit investment property it’s not about the bedrooms, the open floor plan, etc. You’re purely looking at the mechanics of the house to make sure there’s nothing substantially wrong with it.
The age of the furnace, water heater, signs of water damage, condition of the roof. These are the big ones because these are your large capital expenditure items.
When we walked through on Saturday we were already aware of those things. So we were exploring the house more than we did the first time, and sure enough there was an extra, legal bedroom.
How does a home get listed with one less bedroom than it actually has?
Simple. The listing agent likely never stepped foot in it. The owner also (definitely) never stepped foot in it. Somehow, at some point in time, this house was listed as a four bedroom and they just copied the data from the old listing.
It was a pleasant surprise, and it will add a good bit of value. We’d already gotten a very good deal on the house, and this is going to sweeten it further.
I love investing in Detroit.