Menage a Cinq: Buying with Friends
We enjoyed the article–and particularly the narrated slideshow–about the group of friends who got together to buy and renovate a 5-story, 6,000 square foot building in the East Village. In addition to the voyeuristic enjoyment, we were surprised at the lack of discord. For some reason, we have the impression that these types of ventures…
We enjoyed the article–and particularly the narrated slideshow–about the group of friends who got together to buy and renovate a 5-story, 6,000 square foot building in the East Village. In addition to the voyeuristic enjoyment, we were surprised at the lack of discord. For some reason, we have the impression that these types of ventures typically result in infighting and acrimony. We’d love to hear any first hand accounts from people who have teamed up with friends to buy a brownstone together. The pitfalls are many, but clearly there is some price arbitrage that can be benefited from.
Among Friends: Buying and Rehabbing a Townhouse [NY Times]
I am considering doing something similar – but on a smaller scale. Buying a 4-5family for about $1 – $1.5 mil (that means outer brooklyn now) with 2-3 friends and renovating, then taking an apt each and renting others. I would be interested to hear some stories from people who have done this. Good and bad :-).
There was only one brief mention in the article about it, but it did say that one of them quit his job to supervise the renovation. As someone who’s supervised co-op renovations in a small co-op, I suspect that as long as they agreed on the original division, and then as long as the guy supervising kept telling them every detail of what went on & didn’t charge them for it, everyone else would feel like they would be getting their money’s worth. Just my two cents.
I loved this story- LOVED the way they renovated and decorated their apartments. I wish we had the $ to renovate our place to this level and quality.
This goes back to my previous discussion about keeping all old detail vs modernizing. These apts we all gutted and don’t have much old detail, but they’re gorgeous. I really like the window frames… clean and simple… Hmmmm, something to think about.