Curtis Viator bought a house with bats in one of its walls.

He bought another house, on Iberia Street, that had one wall burnt, had no doorknob, had pieces of the ceiling hanging down and had been occupied by homeless squatters.

New Iberia has been trying to get homeowners to fix up dilapidated homes for years. With the forming of its Compliance Department about four years ago, those efforts became more centralized. The City Council now hears about dilapidated properties at every meeting. Sometimes owners fix them up, sometimes they ask for and are granted more time to repair them and sometimes the properties are demolished.

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Sometimes, however, someone buys the buildings and renovates them.

Compliance Director Tim Vice said Viator has taken some properties that probably should have been demolished and made them into “some of the prettiest properties in the area.”

“He does everything first class,” Vice said. “He hasn’t let me down yet.”

Viator and his wife Lorie own Teche Renovated Homes and Teche Roofing and Construction, the first of which has been around about eight years, and the second more than 30.

Viator estimates about 97 percent of the properties he has renovated have been in Iberia Parish, with 65 percent of those in New Iberia.

“A lot of them I’ve been laughed out in the beginning,” he said. “They said, ‘Oh, you need a gallon of gas and a match.’ ”

Teche Renovated Homes is currently juggling about 12 homes in various states of repair (and disrepair). Viator’s phone rings almost as often as he can be seen talking on it.

He says renovating these homes is not something that would be financially viable without a team in place.

It’s because of what he says is a financial unreality that he says The Learning Channel’s “Flip that House” is “the most lying show ever put on.”

“They call it less work than it is,” he said.

His employees strip the houses. They change decking, roofing, vinyl, walls, sheetrock and flooring, putting in new components. They remove cypress, which is used for other projects.

He said the quality of many local buildings’ base materials mean there is no way most of these buildings could be built from scratch for a comparable price.

Viator also recently started looking for another fundraiser for Shepherd’s Food Pantry, which he started with his pastor, Zack Mitchell.

He decided to dedicate to the pantry the proceeds of one house a year. As the Iberia Parish Government is selling the property where the food pantry is now housed, he hopes to use the proceeds from 514 Caroline St., one of the houses being renovated, to build a new food pantry building within a year.

Mayor Hilda Curry said if the city demolishes a building, “that’s an up front cost to the city, and we have to put the cost of the demolition on a tax lien. And sometimes there are so many back taxes by the time you add up everything the liens on the property may be more than the property is actually worth.”

She added that the city’s goal is to get people to renovate property, and emphasized demolition is a last resort.

So when Viator buys a home, it means that instead of issuing a bill it might not collect on for tearing a property down, the city gets a renovated, taxable property and Viator makes money on it, too.

“I really enjoy doing this, seeing something going from just a bunch of matchsticks to something beautiful,” Viator said. “It helps me, but it helps the community, too, praise the Lord.”