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What the Port of Greater Cincinnati Knows About Old Houses

A quiet real estate operator in Cincinnati has spent the last eleven years doing something most investors will not do at scale: buying old single-family homes one at a time, fixing them, and putting them back into use.

Aerial view of a dense residential neighborhood with tree-lined streets and rooftops.

That operator is the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority, the quasi-public agency the City and Hamilton County stood up in 2001. Last month the Port sold its 200th home.

The numbers

The Port sold its first rehabbed house in Evanston in 2015 for $99,000. Two hundred-plus homes later (209 at last count), the average sale price across its homes sits around $195,000.

Evanston, where the Port started with a 30-home project, has bounced back. A Port senior vice president described the private market as now there and developing. Capital goes into a neighborhood institutional money had written off, the homes get restored, and the private market follows.

Buying distress

In late 2021, the Port bought 194 single-family rental homes in one transaction, most of them in Price Hill, from a California company. A California-based owner had assembled a scattered portfolio, run it from a distance, and eventually sold the whole book to a local operator who knew the streets.

The Port has since worked through roughly 79 of those 194 homes and kept going. This spring it picked up another 70 properties in Sedamsville and has 18 homes under construction there. Neighbors responded with "Where have you been?"

The mission

The Port's mission is homeownership. About 60% of its homes are income-restricted, and owner-occupancy is required so the houses cannot slide back into rentals. Partners such as the Greater Cincinnati Foundation and the Cincinnati Development Fund bridge the gap between rehab cost and what a moderate-income buyer can pay. A Port vice president of development described a large number of first-time homebuyers, including single mothers able to give their children a stability they have not had.

What other operators can take from it

The Port has shown, publicly and repeatedly, that buying overlooked Cincinnati homes and putting capital and competent management behind them works.

The Port does this work in the name of homeownership. Others will do it as a rental, an investment, or one house on one street. The motive matters less than the result: a home that was falling out of use is lived in again. Cincinnati has thousands more like it, and we intend to be one of the hands that brings them back.

Read more on how we approach scattered-site portfolios and entry-level homes.

Originally published in the Cincy Cash Flow Report on June 11, 2026.

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