Thinking back on a shoot in 2017, I met a beautiful couple who have spent their lives reshaping neighborhoods by bringing the community together rather than kicking them out. We spent the day meeting the neighbors of the area, viewing certain building projects, and speaking with the Phelps-Kegloviches about their promise to constructing and building families. Below is a small piece from the article, along with my photos. Enjoy!
The first deal Tammy and Jim ever did together had a slightly spooky under-tone. “That’s right, my first deal ever was located right across the street from a graveyard,” laughed Tammy. “I really did not have the strategy down yet at that point!”
Tammy recalled how they purchased the property, and Jim did repairs which, in this case, were mostly cosmetic. “At that time, we just wanted to flip a house. I felt like I was a great real estate agent, and Jim was a great carpenter, and we needed to jump in,” she said.
Soon, the property was market-ready, but that was where the Phelps-Kegloviches found that there was a little bit of a gap between the theory and the practice of real estate. “It was January. We were not in the best location. I was doing everything I had learned to do, holding open houses and marketing the property, and our only buyer ended up being a woman whose parents were buried in that graveyard across the street!”
After that deal was done, the two purchased another residential property that also needed some serious renovations and, due to an uncertain market, ended up using creative financing and their self-directed individual retirement account (IRA) to get the deal to closing. The takeaway after those two deals, for Tammy, was twofold:
“The family that moved into the home raised four children there and are still living there today, which makes me so happy because thanks to the quality, in- integrity, and care that we put into that renovation, we’ve never had any problems with that property and they love the home. We also realized that we needed to look for bigger deals if we wanted to see the returns and cash flow we wanted from the investments we were making of time, emotion, and money.”
The two have done more than a dozen residential flips over the years, but their primary focus has been on their seven multifamily developments spread across Maryland and Virginia.
“Once we realized how many lives we could change if we took our business to multifamily, we couldn’t resist,” Tammy said. “We are perfectionists, and that works better, for us at least, when we are building communities of families instead of individual homes.”
