Ferdinand Escoffery has bought the fire-damaged three-family house at 516 Elm St. and started gutting it for a full restoration, turning a vacant property into his next housing project on Elm Street.

The Bethany-based builder said he closed on the house on May 22 for $240,000 and that his company, National Construction LLC, also received a $392,000 mortgage loan that same day from Pinnacle Financial Services 1 LLC. He said his team has already begun cleaning out and gutting the building, and he hopes to have the rehab finished in about four months.

The work matters now because the house has sat empty since October 2024, when 32-year-old Kenneth Mims died by suicide in a fire there. Escoffery plans to bring the building back as three apartments, a shift that would return housing to a site that has been silent since the fire.

Escoffery said his plan is to take the property down to the studs and strip out the fire damage before rebuilding it. He added that he likes to finish the outside first so the house “looks nice” and is “not an eyesore in the community,” and said he intends to paint it blue and white, which he called his signature color scheme. “I used to do green and white,” he said, describing the change in style.

The move fits a pattern for Escoffery, who has spent the past two decades rehabbing rundown rental properties in New Haven and estimated that he has restored or newly built more than 30 units across the city. He previously renovated 452 Dixwell Ave., a two-family house damaged by fire in July 2024, and that building is now open and occupied again.

He was also finishing four new four-bedroom apartments at 15 Colby Ct. in Upper Westville when he bought 516 Elm St., underscoring how quickly he keeps moving from one project to the next. The unanswered question is not whether the work has started; it is whether the Elm Street house will be ready to reopen as housing on the schedule Escoffery says he can meet.