Wednesday Photo of the Day

We’ve been through this place several times, all the while trying to rationalize why we should stretch to buy it. It has a beautiful facade (although the windows are extremely annoying) and the building/lot sizes are great, but the total gut nature of the necessary renovation is daunting. Each floor, except for the vacant parlor floor, is an occupied rental, but they’re in worse condition than my fraternity house was. The floors are angled dramatically enough that I was tempted to bring in a few superballs to see how far they’d roll from each corner. The ceilings are sagging in many places too. I guess this would be a good place for a developer, as he/she could spruce up the units economically enough for some suckers to rent them out for a bit more money per month. But if your family wants to make this into an owner’s triplex with a garden rental, I hope you have the stomach (and the wallet) for a huge job. Oh, did I mention the pool (read: cesspool)? The worst part is that a deck has been built around it, and the backyard has been separated so that the garden rental has a small outdoor space. How do the upper tenants access the lido deck, you ask? They don’t. The owner of the building also owns the building next door, and she built a stairway to this lot’s pool deck from there. Maybe that arrangement wasn’t to her liking, judging by the science experiments fermenting in the pool now.

With all this said, I ask you: what is this place worth???