Wednesday, March 23, 2005
The latest edge on real estate flipping
Here's your 240-year-old home from eBay
By Janis Mara
Inman News
In a successful marriage of "something old, something new," two Massachusetts businesswomen buy and restore old homes – like the 240-year-old house they bought on eBay, launching their business two years ago.
Shining, deep-toned hardwood floors, an immense brick Colonial fireplace and gourmet appliances atop the original wide-plank pine floors are some of the features of the Benjamin Spaulding House, restored in 2003 by Holly Bradman and Sherrill Rosoff of The Restored Homestead.
Pepperell, Mass.-based Restored Homestead purchases New England Colonial-era houses destined for destruction, dismantles them, moves them to a new location and reconstructs them as new luxury houses, reselling them for a premium.
"We love old homes, and that's why we formed our business," said Rosoff. "These are not the houses of super-wealthy people, but the tradespeople, farmers, coopers, blacksmiths, shoemakers who built a community. By saving the buildings, we are able to continue the history of the families that built them."
Rosoff and Bradman both were real estate agents with 12 and five years' experience, respectively.
"When I moved to Pepperell, I purchased a very old house, probably late 1700s or early 1800s, that needed a great deal of work," said Rosoff. That’s how she got the restoring bug, the former real estate agent said.
Rosoff and Bradman bought the Spaulding House, which was built between 1736 and 1765, for $6,000 on eBay. The two raised the money to buy and restore the home by mortgaging their own homes. It cost them about $350,000 in construction and land costs to produce the finished product, Rosoff said.
The Spaulding house originally was located in Townsend, Mass. The Restored Homestead dismantled it brick by brick and moved it to Brookline NH., about six miles away.
"The Spaulding family came here from England," Rosoff said. "As was the custom, fathers bought land for sons because land was plentiful. Families were large, and so this was a way of helping to secure the families of sons, and sons of sons, for several generations."
The partners sold the house in September 2004 for $570,000. Now they're working on another house and expect about $2 million in revenue from their first year and a half in business.
"This is green architecture taken to the extreme," said Kermit Baker, director of the Remodeling Futures program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. "That has to be one of the oldest houses in the country," he said of the Spaulding house.
The U.S. home remodeling industry was worth around $233 billion in 2003, according to the Center. That's about 40 percent of the more than $550 billion in overall residential construction and home improvement spending in the U.S. that year, Baker said.
The duos' latest project is the Maxcy Fisher house, an 18th-century, working-class family home. Reconstruction will be completed in May, Rosoff anticipates, and the house will go on the market for $1.2 million, the same price range as nearby luxury developments.
"The challenge for our business is to build a new construction exterior frame, or skin, and then put as much of the original frame as possible back inside the new frame," Rosoff said.
The Fisher house has five fireplaces built with 18th-century ballast brick. It now stands on a two-acre lot in Hollis, N.H. The mortise and tenon wood beams of the original house, made of hand-hewn oak sometime between 1720 and 1750, have been reassembled and installed inside the new house, ornamental but not functional.
The company doesn't deal with houses that have major historical significance, at least not in the conventional sense.
"The houses don't have to be on the National Registry to be of importance," Rosoff said. "They're important to the families that contributed to the community. Once we lose those homes, they're gone."
