We Buy Houses in East Lansing, MI

East Lansing is a college town, and its housing shows it: only 39% of occupied homes are lived in by their owners, the lowest share of any town Dave has a page for. A lot of East Lansing houses are rentals, so a lot of the people selling one are landlords.

Picture a landlord who has rented a house near campus for years and is worn out by the turnover every spring. Selling the usual way means waiting for the lease to end, cleaning and repairing between tenants, and scheduling showings around students. Dave buys tenant-occupied houses, so you can sell without emptying the house first.

East Lansing also licenses its rentals. The city’s Rental Housing Division issues and renews rental licenses, runs the inspections that go with them, and keeps a list of deed-restricted parcels. If a license has lapsed or an inspection turned up repairs you would rather not make, tell Dave when you call: he buys houses with code violations, as-is.

The Census puts the median rent in East Lansing at $1,122 a month. If that no longer covers the turnover, the license renewals and the repairs between leases, Dave can buy the house with the current lease in place, and a local title company handles the closing.

Michigan State University was founded in 1855 and moved to what is now East Lansing in 1857. For decades almost everyone lived on campus; the first neighborhoods came in 1887 with Collegeville, along today’s Harrison Road, and in 1898 with the College Delta subdivision, where several professors built homes. The city was incorporated in 1907. Since 1998 it has grown by 425 agreements with Bath, DeWitt and Meridian townships, and downtown has been rebuilt at a much higher density in recent years.

Away from campus, the city is a patchwork of more than 25 neighborhoods, many with associations that hold social events and speak up at city council and commission meetings. Part of the older city is a designated Historic District with its own commission, and many landmark houses in the older neighborhoods are listed under the city’s historic preservation code. Under a 2004 zoning ordinance, several single-family neighborhoods within a mile of campus have used a petition process to prohibit or severely restrict renting, and that area has grown since. Whether a house can legally be rented depends on where it sits.