How can buying an abandoned school be an excellent investment and financial opportunity?
When these three friends and real estate professionals learned about this abandoned high school in Homestead, Pennsylvania, they jumped into buying the property, pooling their money to renovate it.
Adam Colucci, Jesse Wig, and Dan Spanovich purchased the high school building for $100,000.
They spent around $3.3 million to turn it into a 31-unit apartment complex filled with fantastic amenities.
What was once a vacant structure for ten years has become a comfortable living space.
They worked together on the project.
Adam Colucci designed the layouts of the apartment units, and he worked closely with the National Park Service so they could keep and restore the historical significance of the building and earn a historical tax credit for it.
They maintained the 12-foot-high ceilings, original porcelain crown moldings, and terrazzo floors, among others.
Jesse Wig worked on the overall design and finishes and the common space.
This includes the auditorium, which they turned into a common study-slash-recreation area while keeping the original room structure and flooring.
They also turned the school’s gymnasium into a fitness gym with all the weights and equipment on one half while retaining half of the original basketball court and ring.
The building has 27 one-bedroom and four two-bedroom units.
In a video by CNBC Make It, we get a tour of the inside!
Jesse walked through one of the units, instantly giving you an impression of flow and movement inside the room.
You enter the L-shaped kitchen with a clean quartz countertop, white subway tiles, and open shelving.
You move towards the end of the kitchen counter, and it flows through the living room.
It’s a spacious living area.
Since this was an old classroom, they retained the original blackboard as a design feature, adding an interesting accent to it.
The high ceiling and windows made the room look bigger than it is.
The bedroom looks even better with so much natural light coming in.
They retained all the windows to utilize the brightness from the sun to illuminate the room rather than depending on lighting fixtures.
There is also ample closet space with a walk-in closet complete with a washer and dryer.
They also chose an impeccable design for the bathroom with a round mirror, one-bar lighting, and dark hexagon floor tiles.
As the overall project and construction manager, Dan Spanovich had the bigger picture of how much the renovation cost.
The team admitted that they did not expect to spend more than their $2 million budget for construction.
They even shelled out from their own pockets to fill in the financial gap and divided it based on their proportional shares of the project.
The same goes for the profit of the building.
All they earn from Bowtie now fund their next project, the Schwab School right across the street.
They bought it for $90,000 with a mortgage of $3.25 million, but they projected that renovating the property would cost more than that since it was in a more dilapidated state than the Bowtie.
They’re looking to create 31 one-bedroom units and finish the construction in July.
Watch their incredible renovation story in the video below!
