In 2019, Jesse Wig, Adam Colucci and Dan Spanovich bought an abandoned high school in Homestead, Pennslyvania. The trio bought Bowtie High for $100,000 and converted it into a 31-unit apartment building.
During the renovation of Bowtie High, the school across the street went up for sale, so the partners jumped into a second venture together and bought the Schwab School in for $90,000 in October 2020.
“My partners and I really enjoy taking these buildings from nothing into something,” Spanovich tells CNBC Make It. “Schwab was a building that a lot of people in the community had looked at and had come to the conclusion that it just couldn’t be done. That challenge is really what drives my partners and I.”
Before the trio purchased the building, it was a manual training school named after Charles M. Schwab, an American steel magnate born and raised in Pennsylvania. The Schwab Vocational School closed in 1980, and the building has been abandoned on and off since then, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The trio started the renovation of the Schwab building in April 2022. Spanovich says that the school was in much worse shape than Bowtie High. The project took 18 months to complete.
“When we first entered the building, there were trees growing on the first floor and water had leaked down from the top floor,” Spanovich says. “It was in deplorable condition and had much more structural work that needed to be done.”
The renovation included changing all the windows and converting the top floor of the building — the school’s gym and auditorium — into eight two-story apartments.
Wig, Colucci, and Spanovich went into the project with a budget of $3.2 million and, in the end, spent about $4.5 million renovating the Schwab School. That amount includes a $3.25 million mortgage and $1.25 million of the trio’s own money.
They were able to earn $5,000 of it back by selling an old pickup truck they found in the basement of the abandoned building.
Just like with Bowtie High, the…
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