Guffey’s late mother also lived in the house.

“I would have liked, if I didn’t really need the money, to have held onto it forever,” Guffey said. “But that wasn’t in the cards.”Myra McCoy, a friend of Guffey’s mother who lived in the house with her while she was alive and stayed after she died, moved out on Dec. 22.

“What’s to be is to be,” McCoy said from her new residence at 2 Mt. Auburn Street, which is in the same neighborhood as the Sigma Chi house.

For the fraternity, the buy ends a two-year period of homelessness, prolonged by high real-estate prices in a notoriously expensive market and a shortage of money, Salzberg said.

In 1996, Sigma Chi obtained partial ownership of 43-45 Mt. Auburn St. with the Pi Eta Speakers Associates on behalf of the now-defunct Pi Eta fraternity. The club shut down in 1991 following allegations by a Northeastern University alum that she was raped at Pi Eta in 1989.

When the club forced Sigma Chi out of the house over a political dispute in 2001—25 years before Sigma Chi was to take sole control of the building—a legal battle ensued.

In the summer of 2002, Pi Eta agreed to pay Sigma Chi an undisclosed amount of money and sold the house for a reported $2.75 million to the Foundation for Civic Leadership.

Without a regular place to congregate, Sigma Chi “traded volunteer work by its members” at churches and homeless shelters “in return for meeting space,” according to the fraternity’s statement.

Although Salzberg said there is much work to be done on the house—the weeks following winter recess will be devoted to renovations—the members of Sigma Chi are content to have a place to call home and its alums are pleased to know that Sigma Chi will continue to be a presence at Harvard.

“I’m proud to say that Sigma Chi is here to stay as a permanent fixture on the Harvard campus,” Andrew Stoll ’99, president of the alumni association, said in the statement.

Salzberg said the fraternity is not the only organization that has had trouble carving a niche for itself at Harvard.

“It’s really tough, particularly at Harvard, for the Greek scene and for all new organizations in general,” Salzberg said. “If you’re not a final club you don’t have a property, you don’t have a house, you don’t have a place to meet. And we have always desired to have a place even from the beginning.”

The new house—which will be dedicated in January and will house some undergraduates—will “serve as a permanent home for our traditions, our history, our operations,” Salzberg said.

Ali Partovi ’94 helped to start the Harvard chapter of Sigma Chi with a group of friends. Partovi said the success of Sigma Chi’s real-estate venture should give more students the courage to start their own organizations.

“Generally most students look at the menu of opportunities and pick and choose what they think is available to them,” Partovi said. “For us to create something from scratch and then not only start it but also build it up into something that’s really successful and becomes part of the establishment for students to come down the line, is a really exciting thing.”

—Staff writer Andrew C. Esensten can be reached at esenst@fas.harvard.edu.