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Amanda came to St. Louis looking for a duplex. She left with an eight-unit building. Here’s exactly how that happened.
Amanda started this search looking for a one-to-two-unit property in Florida. She ended up closing on an eight-unit building in St. Louis. That’s not a typo.
If you voted in this week’s Investor Brief, you know she seriously looked at two duplexes before she got here:
One in Princeton Heights that looked great until she walked it
One in Tower Grove South that she lost in a multiple-offer situation
Two swings, two misses, and then a question that changed the whole search: If the goal is to build a portfolio, does it actually make sense to do this one duplex at a time?
Most investors ask that question and then keep chasing the next duplex anyway. Amanda didn’t.
The Search: How It Actually Went
Amanda originally had Florida on her radar. She researched markets and ran the numbers, and St. Louis kept showing up on the list. She’s from there. It clicked.
She narrowed the search to a BRRRR or value-add single-family in north St. Louis County and then pretty quickly realized the duplex market was where the real action was. Two properties came into serious contention.
Option 1: The duplex that almost worked (Princeton Heights)
4926 Murdoch Ave. is about 2,100 sq ft. One unit is fully updated, and the other needs work.
On paper, it was a solid value-add play:
Clear upside on the second unit with the right renovation scope
Good fit for a hybrid mid-term and long-term rental strategy
Princeton Heights has the bones that make a renovation worth doing.
Then she walked into the occupied unit. The scope of the renovation didn’t justify the price point. She passed. No drama, just math.
Option 2: The turnkey that got away (Tower Grove South)
3237 Portis Ave is about 2,000 sq ft and is a side-by-side duplex, two 2-bed/1-bath units, garage included. Basically turnkey. This one checked every box:
No heavy renovation required
Strong setup for mid-term rental positioning
Tower Grove South is one of the better rental submarkets in the city.
Amanda went after it hard. Multiple offers came in. She lost.
And here’s where it gets interesting: Many investors lose a deal like that and immediately start hunting for the next comparable property.
Amanda did the opposite: She stopped. She’d now seriously evaluated two properties, passed on one for scope reasons, lost the other in a bidding war, and was no closer to actually building a portfolio. So she asked herself an honest question: Does it make sense to keep doing this one duplex at a time?
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The answer was no. That’s when the search changed.
The Pivot: Why an Eight-Unit Made More Sense Than Another Duplex
Here’s the thing about Amanda that makes this pivot make sense: She’s an architect who works on large-scale commercial projects for a living, evaluating scope, managing timelines, and thinking in systems. The jump from a two-unit to an eight-unit that would feel scary for most first-time investors felt, for her, like Tuesday. The background made her comfortable with both the asset and the decision.
Her agent, Alicia Sierra, Team Leader at The Sierra Group, watched the whole thing unfold. “What stood out with Amanda is that she didn’t stay attached to the original plan,” Sierra says. “She evaluated what would actually move her forward and made a decisive shift. A lot of investors don’t lack opportunity. They lose momentum by second-guessing and waiting too long to act.”
The Building She Bought: 4067 Connecticut Ave
The building has eight units and is over 5,000 sq ft. It’s two blocks from Tower Grove Park. Here’s what made it work:
All units at below-market rents: The upside is already there; she just has to capture it over time.
One vacant unit: Ready to renovate and reposition on day one
Strong mechanics: New flat roof already in place, which means no surprise capital call showing up at the worst possible time
Smart unit mix: Studios, one-beds, and one larger two-bedroom, which lines up well with St. Louis’s growing single-person household trend
DSCR financing: Qualifies on the property’s rental income rather than her personal W-2, with 30-year amortization and rate buy-down options that gave her long-term flexibility from the start
The financing matched the timeline. The unit mix matched the market. The mechanics matched the strategy. That trifecta is rarer than people think.
The Plan From Here
Amanda isn’t trying to force appreciation overnight. The strategy is a two-year repositioning play:
Renovate units gradually as they turn over, starting with the vacant unit
Transition the tenant profile as the building improves
Blend long-term and mid-term rentals to optimize income across the unit mix
Capture both cash flow improvement and forced appreciation across the hold period
Patient capital with a clear thesis. No heroics, no shortcuts—just a plan she can actually execute.
Final Thoughts
The part of Amanda’s story I keep coming back to isn’t the eight-unit property she ultimately bought. It’s the two misses that got her there.
Princeton Heights told her that the renovation scope matters more than the value-add upside on paper. Tower Grove South told her the duplex market was competitive enough that chasing deals deal by deal was going to take forever. Two near-misses, two real data points, one sharper strategy. That’s not a bad outcome for a few months of searching.
A lot of investors lack the willingness to let the search teach them something. Amanda went there.
That’s the move: not just finding the right property but finding the right strategy for where you actually want to go.
Got a search story worth telling? Send it to [email protected], and you might be featured in a future Inside the Search.
