This. When we were condo shopping in Atlanta some years back one otherwise nice option was in a very expensive-to-maintain older building with extremely high HOA fees (something like $700 a month). The seller was offering to pay 7 years of HOA fees as part of the sale! Despite that we ran away as fast as we can. Exactly the same thought occurred to us: we may need to be making the same offer to anyone who bought it from us.
In the end it looked pretty toxic. I think they had a history of unexpected assessments for maintenance work. I suspect that the building being fundamentally expensive to maintain was only part of the story, and terrible management made up a good portion of the rest.
The potential buyers actually like that feature…they want to run their business from the street level office and live upstairs in the apartment. So the officeworkers causing noise below would be them.
This. Most of the responses above are very timid. This *is *possibly an opportunity, but for someone who knows what they are doing. The problem isn’t that situations like this are irredeemable, it’s that they are redeemable by people who know what they are doing, and have time and resources. It doesn’t sound like the OP’s acquaintance knows their way around property transactions.
This seems like not bad advice, depending on what the situation actually is.
My feeling – and I’m certainly not a real estate professional – is that if the sellers are saying right up front ‘Cash only. Because, stupid unfair bank prejudices.’, then just stop right there; it’s probably an unfixable issue.
If it’s more like “fair warning, one potential buyer did have a problem with getting a loan… we think because of X issue”, then it could be worth asking a bank to take a look and identify any concerns they’d have about issuing a mortgage, whether those concerns could be overcome, and if so how.
Times like this, I’m grateful that pretty much my husband’s entire family is in the property development and real estate business. Purchasing our current manufactured home was very easy because the property was managed by Sr. Weasel’s father. (There was one unexpected snag but it was resolved quickly.) But every time I hear about other people trying to locate and purchase a house, it sounds so stressful and complicated. I’ll be grateful for that professional guidance years down the road when we decide to upgrade.
No, it’s a problem if any future buyer needs parking, and it’s a problem because any lender will probably only make a loan to this or any future buyer based on an appraised value that assumes there is simply no off-street parking.
Provided there are no other issues, presumably the lower bound for the value of the property is what it’s worth without any off-street parking. For a purchase price at that appraised value, there’s no reason a bank would not be willing to lend money. Along with looking into whether the easement problem can be resolved, if the buyers are keen it seems to me that they should get an appraiser to tell them how much less it’s worth without parking, so they know the risk. Appraisals are usually a waste of time, but on this kind of thing local appraisal expertise might be helpful - to give a relative valuation with & without parking. Needless to say, don’t take a recommendation for an appraiser from a real estate agent involved in the transaction; but still treat any appraisal with caution, everyone knows everyone else in the real estate business.
It also might indicate that the ‘living space over business space’ isn’t appropriately zoned or runs afoul of some other local law about business access or location. Maybe the neighbors have been trying to get it shut down but it’s been taking time, maybe the former owner is grandfathered in but as a new owner you’ll find that you have to meet current zoning standards, maybe the neighbors let the current guy get away with it for reasons but will take you to court, or a host of other things.