The pictures below are of a house in the Dallas real estate market that was one of a few homes on the list of showings I had for one of my clients last week. 

From the pictures, one might feel reasonably confident that this could potentially be a suitable home for someone looking for quality upgrades, an elevated lot and a larger floor plan.  

Well as a Texas Realtor, I know first hand that pictures can be deceiving.  I’m going to talk about a few things that make this house a very hard sell in today’s market and the ugly side of real estate investment. 

From the pictures I’ve posted here as well as all of the others, this home looks like a possible candidate for luxurious living at an affordable price.  Unfortunately, there are a few things right on the surface that a qualified Realtor should be trained to look for.  I’m going to list only a few of those things about this property that sent my radar up below. 

*First, there were multiple steps going either up or down into almost every room of the house.  To add confusion to this, some steps were a couple of inches high and others were of typical height joined together.  Now I can understand a transition piece from say the hallway into a bathroom for instance.  In this home the transition was two steps up into each bathroom which not only ate away at space in the bathroom, but also creating a tripping hazard when the travertine floor gets wet.

*The foundation was leaning gently from right to left in most of the house.  This is an issue that the investor should have corrected initially.  While he was doing that, he should have made the entire home level with maybe only one or two sunken areas.  Absolutely no bathrooms though.

*Some of the original foundation line and level is not in line with where the walls come down.  This makes for having to carpet over raised concrete right next to the sheetrock.   At the point they realized that this was going to be a problem from poor planning, it was too expensive to fix.