More than a flip, Home Restart’s take on renovation
Mention "real estate flipping," and many people will come back with a less-than flattering image. Maybe it's a shady businessman whose idea of a "rehab" is a new coat of paint and a 200 percent bump in his asking price. Maybe it's a semi-employed hairdresser with more money than experience, whose end product is all style and no structure. It's enough to warn friends and family away from the risks of home ownership, regardless of the many rewards.But there are others involved in the real estate rehabilitation business; professionals whose work walks the fine line between building in value and preserving profit in a rehab project. And these rehab experts are quietly improving the faces of some of the Queen City's most desirable neighborhoods.Locally based Home Restart, LLC, falls into the latter category. The company reports it rehabbed seven homes this year, in neighborhoods such as Hyde Park, Oakley, Edgewood and Fort Thomas, Kentucky. With gross profits on the projects ranging from $50,000 to more than $100,000 over the homes' purchase prices, one might wonder if the company simply "pretties up" the properties. According to vice president Anne Pond, the improvements are very real, and are meant to improve more than just the homes where they're installed."There are a plethora of homes on the market today, many of them short sales and distressed properties that bring down local property values," she says. "We saw an opportunity with Home Restart to help build property values in neighborhoods." She explains that some of the homes Home Restart targets are foreclosed or abandoned properties. Others, however, may be homes where the owners, for various reasons, simply can't maintain a home of a given size or complexity. And while Pond notes that, in the end, the numbers have to make sense before they pursue a project, Home Restart looks for opportunities to make substantive improvements to the properties. They range from installation of high-efficiency windows and HVAC to converting an historic home from four-family back to single-family use.Foreclosed, distressed and abandoned properties could well be considered the windows of Wilson and Kelling's "broken windows effect" - decay invites more decay, driving down the value of an area. No neighborhood, regardless of status, is safe from these problems. But work like that done by Home Restart goes beyond simple profiteering to do something much larger: it is a company tapping a lucrative market niche, for certain. But it's also a service, helping, house by house, to keep Cincinnati's neighborhoods beautiful. Writer: Matt Cunningham
