Transform Your Property for Profit: The Benefits of Group Home Sales

Explore a practical, mission-driven way to sell a longtime home by working with group home operators who value larger, well-located properties and offer seller-friendly terms. Jim Boad explains sober living models, oversight, neighborhood standards, creative financing, and how this option can deliver fair value while doing good.

• what group homes are and how sober living operates 
• why larger, transit-friendly homes are ideal 
• how sales can be faster with fewer repairs 
• creative financing options for steady income 
• maintaining curb appeal and setting house rules 
• addressing neighbor concerns with transparency 
• legal context and reasonable accommodation 
• step-by-step process from inquiry to close 
• success stories that show real community impact

If today's conversation sparks some interest for you about whether you or somebody in your family is interested in selling, you can get a hold of us at edgroupteam.com or you could go to homeaccelerator.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:18 Jim’s Path From Investor To Group Homes
• 2:28 What Group Homes Are And Aren’t
• 3:16 Why Larger Homes Fit The Model
• 4:03 Smoother Sales And Community Impact
• 5:05 Operations, Training, And Pushback
• 6:23 Pricing, Rent-By-Room Economics
• 7:31 Neighborhood Standards And Maintenance
• 8:24 Fair Offers And Needed Upgrades
• 9:16 Referrals, Intake, And Eligibility
• 10:19 Creative Deals And Seller Financing
• 11:19 The Step-By-Step Selling Process
• 12:07 Ideal Property Criteria
• 12:46 Coaching Others And Community Fit
• 13:36 Rules, Oversight, And Safety
• 14:23 Length Of Stay And Progression
• 15:21 A Success Story Of Recovery
• 16:39 Legal Protections And Zoning
• 17:20 How To Connect And Final Takeaways

Transcript

Dennis Day: 0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome to Getting Your Edge How to Downsize. I'm your co-host, Dennis Day, with my other co-host, Judy Gratton. How's it going today?

Judy Gratton: 0:12

It's wonderful, Dennis.

Dennis Day: 0:13

Real estate agents EXP. Our business model is helping people downsize. We know firsthand that selling a longtime home can be overwhelming financially, logistically, and emotionally. We are here to help. Today, guest is Jim Boad, founder of Group Home Accelerator, a program that connects homeowners to group home operators and investors who are looking for properties just like yours. What makes this conversation so interesting is that selling to a group home operator isn't something Downsizers usually think about, but it is an option. It can be a smoother process, good value, even a chance to know that your home will be continuing to be used in a positive and important role in your community. Welcome, Jim.

Judy Gratton: 1:07

Hey.

Dennis Day: 1:08

Thanks for having me.

Judy Gratton: 1:08

So, Jim, before we jump into the details, could you share a little bit about your background and how group home accelerators came to be?

Jim Boad: 1:17

So I pretty much started my real career about 2000, became a real estate investor. I started doing fix and flips in the Metro Phoenix area. I flipped homes in Phoenix till about 2007 before the market really crashed. And then that's when we got really deep in becoming a real estate team and started listing bank-owned homes. We saw it coming. We ran those until about 2010, 2011. Then my wife and I took some time off. We got burnt out from running the REO stuff. It was twice the work for a quarter of the money. But it allowed us to sustain and actually we grew and thrived a little bit through that market as well, but very hard. And then 2014, we moved up to the Seattle area and then we got back into real estate investing. Then I got hit by COVID, and that changed all of my investing strategies because I was becoming a landlord at the time. And it really just pushed me to find a different path because it just wasn't advantageous to be a landlord. For me, most of my people stopped paying and I didn't know how I was going to survive. And that's where one night, after looking at all the red on my spreadsheet, I jumped into this guy's site that was talking about group homes. And it just put me right down this path of group homes, and I've been doing it for almost four years now.

Judy Gratton: 2:25

Can you explain how you do this?

Jim Boad: 2:27

Group homes is a generic term because there's different types of and different levels. There's licensed and unlicensed group homes. I focus on the unlicensed group homes. What I mainly run are sober living houses or recovery houses, is what I call them, but sober living, I think most people know what that means. There's elderly care, but there's different levels of elderly care, which depends on if you need on hand nurses and staff or just a place for elderly people to live. And then there it's also for youth. They also have them for people with disabilities, whether it's physical or mental. Those are the main ones. There's other offshoots, like there's ones for people coming out of prison. There are ones for youth that are phasing out of foster care. And the new big one that everybody's really kind of starting to buzz around is co-living. So just a bunch of people living in one home. My main focus is the sober living one.

Judy Gratton: 3:14

So your main focus is the sober living house.

Dennis Day: 3:16

Correct. We work with a lot of clients who are ready to sell their longtime family home and move into something smaller or go to an RV or a vacation property. How does group home accelerator open up new opportunities for them when they know it's time to sell?

Jim Boad: 3:36

We're always looking for more homes, and it's exactly what we're looking for a lot of the times. We're looking for those downsized homes because bigger homes are definitely better for us in group homes. The more bedrooms, the better. You don't really want a studio or a two-bedroom home. They don't work as well for the community that you're building either because it's much smaller. Four plus bedroom homes are really what we're looking for, or those three-bedroom homes that you can turn into a four-plus bedroom home. Okay.

Judy Gratton: 3:59

Downsizing can be an emotional journey for our clients. How does your program create a smoother, more reassuring transition for them?

Jim Boad: 4:09

The need for group homes of all kinds are so important. There's such a need for them pretty much everywhere, and they really change lives. The ones that I are amazing because I see people coming from their absolute rock bottom, getting clean, getting into a place like this where now they have a safe, secure environment where they can work on themselves and their sobriety and then move on to their next phase in life.

Judy Gratton: 4:30

You managing the homes once they're purchased? Is that also part of what you do?

Jim Boad: 4:36

I have a team here in my town that manage all of mine. I work with a lot of students that I train on how to run group homes. I have a coaching program that teaches people how to run them. And then we have our acquisition side that we help people buy these types of homes too.

Judy Gratton: 4:50

Do you run into pushback from neighborhoods if they know that you're coming in with sober housing?

Jim Boad: 4:55

We absolutely have. And every time we do one, we do get some pushback. The biggest thing that I always do and teach people to do is communicate right away with the neighbors, let them know what you're coming in to do because it softens that blow when you can express to them how your house is going to have rules and guidelines and be maintained. They tend to be one of the nicer homes in a neighborhood. Oh, good. When they run correctly, there are people that run these incorrectly and they give it a bad name. It's like a fix and clipper that does really bad work. We've run into those too. These are probably people from the community they live in. Most likely they are. It's very geographical dependent because the denser areas tend to keep people closer where I'm at. I'm a bit of a smaller town. So I have people that come from quite far away because there is such a need for what we offer.

Dennis Day: 5:39

In our experience, some homeowners are nervous about selling. How might working through with a buyer through the group of home accelerator process be different than just listing on the open market?

Jim Boad: 5:51

One of the biggest things we do is we're not looking to come through and do the traditional, we're gonna buy it, inspect it, and then come back to you with a big list of repairs. The biggest things that we're looking to do is we're looking to close these out pretty quickly, whether we're doing them cash or creatively, because sometimes the creative does work really well for people. Downsize is sometimes they have high equity in it, and the large cash isn't as important, sometimes a good monthly payment or some sort of terms.

Judy Gratton: 6:14

Okay.

Jim Boad: 6:15

We always like to keep that creative door open, but also we use either hard money type loans or private lending. They're much smoother than going through a regular process of purchasing like an FHA loan, where you have to hit certain scans.

Dennis Day: 6:27

So you're not scanning the MLS or Zillow looking for these homes on the open market. Are you working mostly with people who you network that find this is an option?

Jim Boad: 6:39

It's a mixed bag. The MLS has always been our best friend. Having good realtor contacts is really the biggest superpower we've ever had because you just get that direct access to so many different listings. Once people know you're good to work with, they like to come to you and bring deals to you. Because you don't when you don't play games and you actually close the deals that you say you're gonna close.

Judy Gratton: 6:57

In terms of pricing, is there a specific area that you like to stay in? We know that market values have risen significantly. How is that affecting you and what are you doing about that?

Jim Boad: 7:11

Our model allows us to generate substantially more than a market rate because we're renting these homes out by the room as opposed to by the whole house. So we can get substantially more between 5 and 10x what you would make as a regular residential rental.

Judy Gratton: 7:26

A lot of people, when we're talking about downsizing, they care very deeply about what's gonna happen to their home when they leave. You mentioned briefly that you'd communicate with the community. What kind of benefits do they have from selling to you? And how can you show them that you're gonna contribute to the community?

Jim Boad: 7:46

Absolutely. Some of the biggest benefits are just what the mission is of what these homes are for. They're really there to help people get back to where they need to be. And if people aren't doing the right thing in these homes, we do have the power to remove them from the home. So if they just sold it to an investor who was going to throw some tenants in there, they might throw some 23-year-olds in there that want to drink and party all night long and plast the radio. And there's really nothing you can do as a landlord. I mean, yes, you can start to police and you go down that process, but we all know what it takes to kick somebody out in Washington State right now. It is not an easy task. So we have a lot more control over that. If we have bad actors, we actually have the power to move them on. No matter what type of group home someone's opening when they operate them right, you're directly impacting people, whether it's somebody who needs elderly care or somebody who needs that great place to get sober and rebuild their life.

Judy Gratton: 8:37

You don't put a sign out front, sober living or recovery home or anything like that. So they sort of blend in.

Jim Boad: 8:44

You'd never know with our homes.

Judy Gratton: 8:46

Do you maintain the exterior of the home? Great.

Jim Boad: 8:49

Absolutely. It's one of the big things with the model as well, that you, as the operator of the group home, basically take on everything.

Judy Gratton: 8:56

The seller can rest assured that their garden and their green lawn and their freshly painted house is gonna be maintained, whereas that's not always the promise when you sell to just anyone.

Jim Boad: 9:11

Correct.

Judy Gratton: 9:12

That's a big benefit for the community.

Jim Boad: 9:15

No, I agree. In my homes, the guys actually start taking a lot of pride in the homes. They like mowing the lawns and keeping them maintained. They have a good sense of ownership in those.

Judy Gratton: 9:23

Cool.

Dennis Day: 9:24

One of the big questions for me, and perhaps a home seller, is Am I going to get a fair price if I take this program on?

Jim Boad: 9:33

Absolutely. It's not like we can go in and pay over market value for homes or anything. And we like to get good deals as well, especially on move up homes. There's updating and things that need to be done. When someone's owned a home that long, there tends to be some deferred maintenance. Hot water heaters tend to be much older. I'm going to put six, eight people in this home that are going to be active people. We're looking for good deals that account for what we may have to do to the home.

Judy Gratton: 9:56

What is the age range of people that come into your homes?

Jim Boad: 9:59

For the sober living, it's normally in that middle age, but it really is going to depend on the geographical area that you're in. If it's a younger area, you're going to tend to have younger people. But we do have every age range in our home.

Judy Gratton: 10:10

How do you get these people? Where do you find people that need sober living?

Jim Boad: 10:17

The main source that we use right now is inpatient drug clinics. We don't take people that are actively using, and we are not a rehab clinic. They have to come to us clean. So they're normally coming out of a program. They've already done all of that detoxed and they're on a plan working with counselors. So what we offer is one thing, and it's affordable, clean housing.

Dennis Day: 10:36

I'm really interested in learning more about a different model. The basic model for downsizers, we put our home on a market, it sells for a price, and homeowners get a lump of cash. But you talked about a different model of paying payments per month.

Jim Boad: 10:52

Can you talk about that more? Absolutely. Sometimes we'll have somebody who has a really good loan that we may be able to work with and take over at with a great rate. That's been a nice thing in this market where rates have fluctuated quite a bit. Who doesn't like taking over a three or four percent interest rate? And when people own them as well, sometimes we can satisfy them. How about we give you $150,000 down to get you into your new home? Arbitrary numbers, and then we'll make you payments at this interest rate for five years or three years or whatever terms we come to. And then that can work out really well, also, because then we don't have to come up with as much to get into that home. And it allows us to have a few years to stabilize that home, get it up to the standard that we need, and then refinance it. We'll refinance it and cash them out.

Dennis Day: 11:33

So they could get a stable monthly income and some cash so they can move on to the next phase of their life, but still have a supplement to Social Security or their retirement funds.

Jim Boad: 11:47

It's worked well for some people that are like, I want to buy an RV and the travel, and then they have a nice stable monthly income coming off that property. They still have that reserve too. Some people don't always want all that cash at once. They'd either don't know how to utilize it or it's just not important to them at the time.

Judy Gratton: 12:02

If one of our clients was curious about this option, what would the process look like for them from the first conversation to the closing of the sale?

Jim Boad: 12:11

Really, the first conversation is just uh getting the address and doing my basic due diligence and research. That will tell me a lot because we'd have to be in pedestrian-friendly areas. I can't be real rural because we have a lot of people that come to us without vehicles. Sometimes we will have somebody who comes to us just with one bag of clothes. It can be challenging for them if they're too far away. We have to assess that it's in the right location. And then from there, it's just me running my comps. At some point, I got to come out and do a walkthrough on the home to see what it looks like and then make an offer. If they accept that offer, we'll close on time and we're not looking for major repairs.

Judy Gratton: 12:43

Are you working with realtors through this process or are you a realtor?

Jim Boad: 12:48

My wife is a realtor. This isn't as much about us as building a real estate business as it is about building because my mission in life is group homes. It's helping people open more group homes because we need them so bad. Right. We love to work with realtors, they're our favorite because realtors understand what to do, they understand the rules, and realtors are worth their weight.

Judy Gratton: 13:09

Can you give me an idea of what a perfect home would look like for you?

Jim Boad: 13:13

A perfect home would be close to bus lines and services like grocery stores, hospitals, and doctors. It would have more than four bedrooms and more than two bathrooms. And if it doesn't have those things, it would have the ability for us to do them fairly easily. Enhance the square footage of the home, be able to maybe we have an open office that could now be the fourth bedroom, or we this extra large laundry room that could become a half-bath and still be a laundry room.

Judy Gratton: 13:39

You mentioned you manage some of these. Are you working to help other people acquire homes that could be turned into the group living model?

Jim Boad: 13:49

Absolutely. In my town, I have 14 active homes right now. Wow. In Shelkland. It's a very small community, which shows how a community of 11,000 people can support that many homes. I have group home accelerator in my coaching program. I help them get into homes as well. I teach two methods, how to purchase these homes and how to rent these homes from people. The challenge for a lot of people is how to explain to somebody why you should let me do this to your home. The initial connotation can be really negative. Oh, you're opening a flop house or a boarding, and they they instantly that just gives people there's going to be beer bottles in the yard and selling drugs out the windows. Our homes are quiet. We have curfew hours, chore lists. Normally, our homes all have daily visits where someone's popping by, so nothing can ever get too out of hand. We give all of the neighbors our phone numbers. So if there are issues, they know how to get a hold of us. Hey, you guys are parking in front of my house again. Johnny, stop parking in front of the house, or we're gonna have to make you leave.

Dennis Day: 14:44

Do you have any all-women homes?

Jim Boad: 14:47

I personally do not. I have students that have all women homes. We have family homes. I don't think you should have men and women commingled in the same homes. It's just a recipe for problems to me. I have people that run, it might be saying the name wrong, but they're like battered women's homes. So women who are fleeing domestic violence. Those are another one that there's just such a shortage of. And they blend into the community really well, and they're people that are very grateful to be there. Is there time limits on how long people can stay? No, we don't have any type of time limits. I've got people that I've been with me around in three years now. They've worked their system. The way I work it is we have levels of homes. We have our entry homes where we bring people because you're the highest likely to relapse when you're new to this. The longer you've been in one of these types of homes, the higher probability you have to not relapse again. Some of them just love it so much. It is affordable living. They're just paying for a bedroom. Normally, people come to us with some sort of state or federal funding, which is awesome as an operator because I'm guaranteed funding. As they progress, we can move them into different homes where they can self-pay and stay as long as they wish. They still have to go under the same exact rules. There's no time frame where those rules phase out. Now you can drink again. That's just not allowed in our properties.

Dennis Day: 15:55

Can you give us an example of a success story where it benefited the community and it benefited the seller?

Jim Boad: 16:01

I think the biggest thing about benefit in the community is we're taking people that need this help that aren't themselves being a benefit to our community, and we're getting them back to being a contributing part of our community. People are getting jobs. One guy, he left about eight months ago, and he was one of our first guys. He came to us just battered down. He was missing most of his teeth and wouldn't look at you, and he didn't really want to engage. By the time this guy left, and I shook his hand and saw that big smile at Pearly White's because he got new teeth, and he was so grateful and thankful because his whole life had changed. He was in his early 30s, and the majority of his life, he has been under the influence of some sort of drug or alcohol. He's never been sober this long. He had a new job that he loved. He was heading across the country in his truck to reconnect with his family that he hasn't seen in years because of his drug addiction and they didn't want him around. So it's not a direct impact where, hey, we built a park in your neighborhood, but it's a direct impact where, hey, there's 45 people that just became sober in this neighborhood and are now contributing and doing the right thing. And I think the biggest thing as the homeowner who moves on from that is knowing that now their home that they've been able to live in and raise a family and they've got other people that are now doing that same thing.

Judy Gratton: 17:09

And maintaining the home.

Jim Boad: 17:11

Absolutely. And keeping the neighborhood up, not being bad neighbors. Because that matters to a lot of people too. They love their neighborhood, they love their neighbors, they don't want to sell it to somebody who's going to come in and do bad things.

Dennis Day: 17:19

Is it possible for the seller to avoid the difficulties of preparing the home and the expense of painting and do an off-market sale?

Jim Boad: 17:30

Absolutely. The biggest issue I take with off-market sales for us is it's challenging when you're the educated one. You have to educate the other side. That's why I love working with realtors because they have their protection and can't say that I took advantage of them and say I had representation. This was a good price. I'm not bringing up comps from my neighborhood that are five times lower than the comps in their neighborhood.

Judy Gratton: 17:50

What areas are you looking in?

Jim Boad: 17:52

We're always looking in pretty much all areas. The biggest thing is not rural. Anything that's close to bus lines, anything that's got great walkability scores, those are always areas we're looking to buy homes in.

Judy Gratton: 18:03

Do you look at other states besides Washington?

Jim Boad: 18:06

Absolutely. One of the things, like I was saying, with Group Home Accelerator, I am a national coaching program. I don't go outside of the U.S. with anything because I don't know the rules. But the rules for this run pretty much across the USA. When you start running these homes, you asked some questions earlier about neighbors getting involved, code enforcement can tend to get involved too. Because some neighborhoods have a rule where you can't have more than four or five people that are unrelated live in a home. But when you get into these group homes, specifically with sober living, you start running into the Disabilities Act stuff because now drug addiction is classified as a disability. There is federal case law on this in multiple states where Oxford House, a big nationally run sober living cohort, and they have their own chapters and rules. They've had to fight this and they've taken it to Supreme Court and won their cases. Cities had to pay them restitution for the issues they've caused that. So you can normally not have to follow those rules because the classifications of this type of thing.

Dennis Day: 19:04

So if someone was interested, a realtor, homeowner, how would they get a hold of you?

Jim Boad: 19:10

Easiest way are either social media or just go to Group Home Accelerator and reach out to me. I've got a form on there that you can schedule and we can talk and figure out if you've got a home that works for us and if we can make you a great offer that works for you.

Judy Gratton: 19:21

I think it's a fascinating program. And I support the idea wholeheartedly. It would be great for people that are downsizing. It gives them an option that maybe they hadn't thought of. I think it is definitely a positive for community because it helps to bring these people back into the community and the home might be better taken care of than just renting or selling to someone you don't know. I think it's a great idea, Jim. I really do.

Dennis Day: 19:51

Thank you. If today's conversation sparks some interest for you about whether you or somebody in your family is interested in selling, you can get a hold of us at edgroupteam.com or you could go to homeaccelerator.com.

Jim Boad: 20:07

I think you guys asked great questions and gave a good synapsis of what I do.

Dennis Day: 20:11

Well it's really great you have this option that never occurred to me. This would be a win-win for many people, not everybody. Like you said, somebody in a two-bedroom condo, not gonna work. But it is another option. Maybe you get a stable income that helps you out in a long term fashion. So thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thank you to our listeners and our watchers on YouTube. Information about Jim will be available at the YouTube channel and the audio podcast. So until next time, thank you, Jim Bode. Thank you, Judy. Bye. Bye.