Quite a few years ago, I was sending items to a new auctioneer. He would take my small items and not give me grief when they didn’t do a thousand dollars. We sold a bunch of stuff.

One day I got to asking him about what happens to the houses that he’s cleaning out. He figures that the estate sells them off. I told him that he’s missing the boat. He’s buying the beds, tables, big furniture and making a few hundred dollars on the stuff and missing the sale of the house where the big money was. I told him to buy the house outright. He told me he didn’t have that kind of money. I told him, I did. A partnership was born.

A month went by and I finally got a call from him. It seems a landlord was getting pressured from the City of Boston to clean-up his drug infested house in East Boston or start paying a hefty fine.

My partner was cleaning it out and asked him how much he wanted for the house that had no plumbing and was covered inside in gang graffiti. The landlord wanted a fast sale and told us he wanted $125,000 for this triple in Jeffries Point. I told him we could close in a few weeks.

We needed access to the building to get it ready for sale (smoke alarms, paint over the graffiti, etc.). He allowed it and we went to work.

We bought it on a Friday. Sunday, we had an open house. We got four offers. One was for $200K with an inspection and mortgage contingency and one was for $190K cash. I took the cash offer and we closed in seventeen days. Sweet. We went on to buy two more houses together before he got out of the business.

Bob Adams has been in Somerville 27 years but was a frequent visitor prior to moving here. He worked as a jeweler in a few shops in his younger years, owned his own shop for a bit, sold real estate for 10 years and is always hunting for his next treasure. He has been an antique and collectibles dealer for 30 years. He can be reached at 27winter@gmail.com.