Sell Your Columbia Tusculum Multifamily Building.

Columbia Tusculum wears its age on the outside — the painted Victorians on the hill are the postcard version of the neighborhood. Behind them is a working stock of frame doubles, small flats, and two-family buildings on the flats near the river road, plus apartments over the storefronts along the business strip.

Age here means specific things to an owner. Foundations of stone or brick rather than poured concrete. Framing that predates any code you could look up. Additions layered on over a century. Narrow lots wedged between the hillside and the road, with a driveway that was designed for a much smaller car.

It's also a genuinely appealing place to rent — a short run to downtown, the riverfront right there, and long-standing neighborhood institutions like The Precinct anchoring the strip. Tenants like living here, which is half the battle in any building.

Bringing new life to historic properties is my favorite part of this work. When I take on an old building, I contract the work myself, keep the trim and the stairs and the original doors where they can be saved, and put the money into the systems that actually make a place livable.

That's a different intention than the buyer who prices your building as a teardown or plans to strip it down to the studs and out to the siding. If you've spent years keeping an old building honest, it matters who gets it next.

And I hold. I'm not putting it under contract to hand off to somebody else, and I'm not buying it to resell in a year. I buy, I fix, I manage in house, and I keep it.

Old buildings on tight lots don't show well to a crowd, and a marketing campaign here means a lot of strangers walking through occupied apartments to look at a foundation. I don't need that and neither do your tenants.

One walk-through by me, the leases carried forward as they are, and no requirement that anyone move out before closing. Vacant units are fine too. I've bought buildings in every state of occupancy, and I'd rather see the building the way it actually lives than the way it stages.

The conditions that scare off out-of-town buyers here are the conditions I expect: a settled corner on an old foundation, a hillside that moves, water management on a steep lot, a roof line that's been added onto three times, knob-and-tube behind plaster, questions about what's in the flood map near the bottom of the neighborhood.

I inspect these myself and I buy as-is. I'm a cash buyer with no financing contingency, so a rough inspection report doesn't blow up the deal three weeks in. Tell me the truth about the building and I'll tell you the truth about my number and how I got there.