Walked after $96k of drawings that never got permitted

The $96k is the part I want to sit with. That's 28% of purchase price spent on paper. I've seen conversion feasibility budgets in the 3 to 6% of total project cost range and you blew past that because you kept redrawing instead of stopping after version one. When the historic commission said no to the rear stair, what did your remaining upside look like on paper? If version two killed the numbers and version three cost $118k, the answer was probably already there and you paid for two more rounds to confirm it.

Six months of looking at buildings like this and egress has never once come up in a listing description. Thanks for the specific.

The structural sign-off you got before closing answered a different question than the one that governed your deal. Sound framing tells you the building will stand. It says nothing about whether the vertical circulation, window openings, and plumbing stacks support residential occupancy, and those three are where most office and retail conversions die.

On egress specifically, requirements vary by jurisdiction and by which code edition your city has adopted, so the only reliable answer comes from the local code official and fire marshal in writing before you commit. In general, mixed occupancy buildings put pressure on separation and egress paths between the residential and commercial portions, and a single stair discharging into a tenant space is a common failure point in exactly the building type you bought. Whether a second stair is required, and whether an existing-building or alteration pathway offers relief, depends on your local adoption and on how the official reads it.

The sequencing lesson is the one worth extracting. A feasibility spend of $96k is not unreasonable for a conversion. Spending it after closing with no contingency left is what converted a no-go answer into a $112k loss. Operators who do this repeatedly buy the feasibility study during due diligence, or they option the building, or they write a contingency that survives until a pre-application meeting has happened.

One number I would want from you: at what unit count did the deal still work? If four units was the only version that penciled, you had a single-point-of-failure underwriting, and a building with one interior stair was always going to test it.

I'm still building my first-deal cost sheet and I did not have a line for code consultant. Adding it. What did that one actually cost you out of the $96k?

Version two and three are textbook scope creep, just on the drawing side instead of the construction side. Once you've spent real money you start solving the problem instead of asking whether it's worth solving. I've done the same thing with a roof, three engineers deep on a building I should have dropped.

Also the historic commission calling an alley a contributing view is going to live in my head for a while.

So the thing that killed it was a staircase. That's the part that scares me about conversions. In a boring rental you can at least see what's wrong.

@ledger is right that you paid twice to learn the same thing but I'd push back on the framing. The rear stair was approved by the fire marshal. If the historic commission had gone the other way you'd have a finished building and nobody would call the $96k a mistake. That's not bad process, that's a coin flip you didn't know you were flipping.

Where I'd criticize is buying with no option period long enough to hold the pre-app meeting. That part was in your control.

@flint I don't think it's a coin flip if the answer was knowable. Historic district commissions publish their minutes and their design guidelines in most places. Read six months of minutes and you learn what they say no to. That's a weekend of work before you wire $340k.

@quill did you look at the guidelines at all beforehand, or did the district status just not register as a live constraint?

I've got two buildings on my list right now that are one-stair. Both downtown, both second floor vacant. Going back and looking at where the stair lands today.

The guy who bought it for one big office is the tell. Somebody was always going to make money on that building, just not doing what you wanted to do. Sold for $11k over your purchase after 11 months, which means the market priced it as an office building the whole time and you priced it as apartments.

Question about the paperwork side. When you bought, was the historic district designation disclosed in the contract or did you find it yourself? I ask because designation shows up differently depending on the state and the municipality, some record it against the parcel and some just maintain a district map at the planning office, and a title search doesn't always surface a district overlay the way it surfaces a covenant. If your file went through without anyone naming it, that's a gap worth knowing about for the next one.

Also worth pulling: whether the previous owner ever applied for anything and got denied. Prior denials are the cheapest data in the building.

$118k for a scissor stair in 6,800 sf makes sense to me if the floor framing is old joists on masonry bearing walls. You're not just building a stair, you're cutting a hole in a diaphragm and adding beams and probably new bearing down to a footing that isn't there. People hear "stair" and think $30k.

The cheaper move is sometimes a stair in the rear of the retail with a rated enclosure, giving up 100 sf of commercial. Did the retail tenant math ever get looked at that way? Losing 100 sf of ground floor is a lot cheaper than $118k.

@girder that's the version I'd have chased. @quill was the retail already leased at that point or was it still vacant?

I've spent a year not buying anything and posts like this are half the reason. Though I notice the lesson isn't "don't do conversions," it's "get the egress drawn before closing." That's a process fix, not a reason to stop.

Starting from nothing here so a lot of this is over my head, but I understood the shape of it. A building can be structurally fine and still not be legally usable as apartments. I didn't know those were separate questions.

Currently 7 months into something similar and your post made me go check my own contingency dates. Mine expired in April. Great.

The part I'd flag for anyone reading: pre-application meetings are usually free and some places will do them on a sketch. There is no reason to skip that step. I skipped it because I thought showing up with half-finished drawings would make me look unserious, which is a stupid reason to lose a hundred grand.

Dumb question, what's a pre-application meeting actually like? Do you bring an architect or can you just walk in with a floor plan and ask?

@compass not dumb, I was wondering the same. Everything in this thread was new to me and I read it twice.