Marilyn Wilson Dream Properties Inc.
155 Marquette Ave., Ottawa
Asking Price: $988,000
Selling Price: $980,000
Previous Selling Price: $505,000 (2006)
Days on Market: 103
Taxes: $7,526 (2018)
Listing Agent: Chris Lacharity, Marilyn Wilson Dream Properties Inc.
The action
A group of three buyers struck a deal for the property with help from the seller, who accepted vendor-take-back financing. The seller structured the deal with a loan of $266,000 at 5.5 per cent interest, to be paid back over two years.
“We really struggled to get this through the bank, but it was a creative situation to make everybody happy,” listing agent Chris Lacharity said. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way."
Mr. Lacharity said there were a lot of calls for the property, since it’s a rarity to find a sixplex. But many prospects, he says, would scratch their head, struggling with calculations of the potential for income from the property.
“I had a lot of calls that’d go – after it was conditionally sold – ‘Well, give me a call when it falls apart, I’m good for $750,000,’ knowing you were talking already at $980,000. But the buyers saw value in it,” he says. “They’re in the trade business, where they can renovate the building over time inexpensively and know what they have in the future.”
What they got
The building is in the Vanier neighbourhood, an up-and-coming part of town about 10 minutes from the Byward Market. It is subdivided into six separate units. All of the tenants have said they are staying on. The buyers were undeterred by evidence that the building was in need of urgent attention, including the discovery during their inspection of a “massive rat” behind the fridge in one unit.
“Nothing scared these guys,” Mr. Lacharity says. “They were the right buyers, and we kept going with it.”
The agent’s take
Mr. Lacharity said this wasn’t the kind of property he usually sells (he mostly deals in luxury properties), but he had helped the current owner buy the rare sixplex about 10 years ago. He said that, by standard rule of thumb, the property value was probably around $700,000, but given extremely low inventories, the current market value was significantly more.
Mr. Lacharity said he believed buyers would immediately see the investment potential in the property. “I just knew because of the location of Vanier, [and that it’s] finally growing, that someone could come along and replace windows, kitchens, and [could] raise rents. And that’s exactly what happened.”
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