Riverstone Condominiums

Riverstone is Sold Out.

Background and Challenge
Riverstone is located on SE 6th and 140th NE in east Bellevue close to Bellevue College and the Microsoft Overlake Campus. The property is a condominium conversion consisting of townhomes and flats in an affordable price range for the Eastside.

Riverstone was appointed a receiver in the summer of 2009. This property appealed to first time buyers and at that time, financing for low down payment buyers was just not available. Therefore, one of our big challenges was the lack of financing for buyers that had less than 20% down payment.

In addition, the property was "shop worn," having been on the market with the developer for some time.  The renovation was still not complete so there were homes under construction while others were rented so the property looked old and worn and there was little ready inventory to sell.

Solution
We inspected the available homes to determine what construction work remained to be completed. We then recommended a local contractor who we had worked with successfully in the past to bid the completion of the job.

We then approached the construction lenders to negotiate a financing package that would be suitable for first time buyers to assist us in the sellout. This consisted of portfolio loans that closed as we sold the homes from those lenders that had construction financing on the property. The low down payment loans were underwritten to FHA standards.  In the meantime we worked with the lenders to obtain FHA approval for the project. Then we set out to sell the homes with our first goal to reach the 51% presale in a timely manner so the lenders could sell their loans to FHA.

We then set out to redesign the marketing campaign to make the property look new and fresh. We organized a large grand opening event to the broker community offering reduced pricing and agent incentives to get them interested in the property again and to gain their participation in the rest of the sales campaign. We sold 17 homes during our opening week.

During our sales effort, a pattern emerged of buyers that were primarily from the local East Indian community. In order to better serve this clientele, we hired a real estate expert from their community to train our sales people to understand their cultural traditions and biases in order to communicate effectively with this target market.

Results
We were able to obtain FHA financing which allowed buyers the minimum down payment available in the market and allowed the construction lenders to sell their portfolio loans to FHA. Our outreach and sales efforts with the East Indian community resulted in the successful sale of over 45% of the remaining homes to this buyer group.