POST 18...Horse Barn with Stripper Poles and Good Karma

This is a quick story about one of the more unusual residential properties my business partner and I renovated. 

Most of the older central Phoenix neighborhoods were built during the post-war boom that was flourishing by the early 1950’s. Many of these neighborhoods were former citrus groves and thus irrigated. These charming districts typically have lush vegetation and often very large trees due to all the available water.

At about 11th Avenue and Osborn Road in central Phoenix sits a five-acre "horse property" that a married couple improved with a barn back in the mid 1940’s. They planted eucalyptus, pecan, pear, and peach trees, and kept their horses there. The barn was near the south end of the site. In 1950 they decided to build an apartment complex towards the north end of the site, fronting Osborn. They built thirty-eight units, 1100 to 1300 square feet, pretty spacious for 1949-50. As a part of the development, the couple converted the horse barn into a residence that they would occupy and thereby be able to manage their new apartments on-site. The wife was an artist and painted a mural on one wall in each apartment, and a very large mural in the dining room of the converted horse barn.

The property was apparently considered newsworthy as I found several articles in local newspaper archives describing the great job that the owners-the Higginbothams-had done. They lived the rest of their lives at their mid-century modern project, which they called Nonpareil Apartments. Decades later, a condo –converter developer bought the entire property from the estate, did some repairs and upgrades, and sold all 38 units. The horse barn house was a part of the horizontal property regime and also offered for sale as a “condo”, though it was a freestanding structure sitting on its own acre near the rear of the property. Well, I love unique properties and bought it as is.

 For a 1950 vintage home, was amazingly well preserved. The old couple took good care of it cosmetically, as the following pictures show. It still needed a lot of infrastructure work—new electrical service, HVAC, roof, plumbing, etc., which we did. But cosmetically we just enhanced what was already there.

The kitchen counter tile, cabinets, vintage appliances, and lighting were in mint condition. One of the cabinets was a flour bin lined with tin, and flipped out like a clothes hamper. Many of the upper cabinets had sliding fluted glass doors.  The artist-owner had painted some tiles and created a little mural over the kitchen sink.

The main living room was gargantuan, the size of a ballroom, with a massive fireplace. It had eleven foot ceilings, large picture windows, and opened onto an enormous walled patio.

The open dining room had six steel poles that separated it from the ballroom. We sanded them down to the bare metal and removed the old flower boxes at the base. Later when we were showing the home to some potential buyers who were dance instructors, they said, “Wow! We can teach stripper dance classes in here!” I certainly wish they would have bought it and invited me over…Anyway, the dining room also had a large built-in china cabinet in some kind of blond wood finish, and a massive, oriental style mural painted on a curved wall.

Both bathrooms were also mint condition, with more tile art murals and some near-perfect vintage plumbing and electrical fixtures.

Both bedrooms were very large, also with blond wood built-ins, and the master had its own patio. Every room in the house had clerestory windows, all functional, that let in tons of light and fresh air.

Apparently because it was originally a barn, the original structure sat on a very thick concrete slab. We discovered this by accident while cutting into the slab in the living room to install some electrical floor plates, and had to sawcut through ten inches of concrete! Now I knew why some of the enormous eucalyptus trees that sat literally inches from the house had not made the slab buckle over the years.

It was a really fun remodel project, and the finished result had lots of market appeal because it represented the best of both worlds: It was a freestanding, private home with its own ballroom, situated on a irrigated common acre cared for by the HOA, and yet had the lock-and-go-convenience of a condo!

The only problem was, we completed the project at the end of an up-cycle and therefore could not sell it for a profit. We rented it out for a year or so, and when it later became clear that the Phoenix condo market—even the new million-dollar high-rises downtown—was in the toilet so to speak, we sadly sold it at a loss.

I learn something on each project. On the horse-barn-with-stripper-poles project, I learned among other things, that real estate investing and developing are like standup comedy: timing is everything. I also learned that the more unique the property, the less of the market it will appeal to. The upside is that there is always that one buyer who will see and appreciate the uniqueness, and pay extra for it in an upward-moving market.  You just have to allow for a longer marketing period to make a larger margin. We’ve proven that with several other unique projects that were better-timed in the market cycle.

Another thing I learned is how to look at taking a financial hit in a positive light: The buyer got a fantastic deal on an absolutely beautiful, unique property. It hurt at first, but I now truly feel happy for the buyer and calmly remember that as a result, I have accumulated some good karma for the future.


This is one of my real estate posts but I can’t help but interject a little East Indian philosophy: karma literally means “action” in the sense of generating a reaction, and for the Hindus and Buddhists it operates in an absolutely impersonal, blind-justice way, continually returning all things to balance, no matter how long that might take. It can be trusted every time, and in the West, we describe it as Newtons' Third Law of Motion. You know, that acton-reaction thing. Its operation is also suggested in the concept of The Golden Rule.

On this project I was also reminded that real estate renovation and re-development are very healthy activities for your brain, because you are simultaneously exercising both the logical/practical and the inventive/creative hemispheres of your mind.  In time this will give you a nice, thick corpus collosum which helps prevent dementia as you get older!