Colleen Higgins has purchased a four-family house on Olney Street in Providence through a short sale.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

After months of delays, the short sale of 104-106 Olney St. in Providence went through as rescheduled on May 22, according to the buyer and seller in the transaction, Colleen Higgins and Jeremy G. Cohen.

The four-family house sold to Higgins for $328,000. The house had been purchased in October 2006 by Cohen for $568,000.

Cohen, who now lives in Miami, and could not be reached for comment for a May 24 Journal story about the long transaction process, said he objected to some of Higgins’ statements in that story, including her characterization of the building as “crumbling.”

“She got an absolute steal and she knows it,” he said in an e-mail message to The Journal.

Cohen said he lived in the building for a time, was friends with the tenants, and had arranged to have one of them act as property manager in his absence.

“Snow removal was her number one priority seeing as how I left in January, and I told her not to waste her money on the lawn because we were supposed to close two months ago,” he said in the e-mail message.

Cohen added that the second mortgage of $113,000, which Higgins had said was a surprise that delayed an April closing date, should not have been a surprise to anyone. “The buyer’s agent was made aware of a second lien by me, personally, prior to Christmas,” he said.

“The major holdup was Wells Fargo wanting the second lien holder to get completely stiffed, not the second mortgage popping up out of thin air at the 11th hour,” he said

He also said he was unaware of any offer by Higgins to repair a leaking toilet, which he said was “a result of a party by college kids that took place long after I relocated to Florida.”

Cohen said he rejected two previous offers to buy the house because the other buyers would have demanded “the eviction of all parties occupying the home.”

“As I lived at 106, Unit 1 for over two years, those tenants were my friends and I told them I’d hold out as long as possible to find a buyer that wanted an occupied multi, rather than someone who wanted to throw them all out. In that, I succeeded,” he said.

Higgins, who uses a wheelchair, plans to move into the house as soon as a first-floor unit can be made accessible, and she said she plans to be a full-time landlord. On May 28, she said, the water service to the house was turned off because of an unpaid water bill of more than $700 that had been due in April. She said it was her understanding at the closing that Cohen would pay the bill. Cohen said he has talked to the tenants last week, and he doesn’t believe water service was ever interrupted. In any case, he said, he “insisted” during negotiations that the buyer absorb unpaid utility costs. “I knew this would be a lengthy process and didn’t want to have to come up with three grand on top of taking a loss,” he said.

Cohen said when he first bought the building, he planned to convert the apartments to condominiums and sell them. “What stopped my condo project dead in its tracks was fire code amendments in the city — what would have been a $60,000 job turned into $200K,” he said.

Cohen said he is still in the lending business, and has incorporated his own business in Florida, called Providence Capital LLC, named in honor of his home city.

cdunn@projo.com