“These homes for sale SUCK!” CNN has a interesting article about the squalid condition of many of the homes on the market these days.
“The properties smell,” said Eve Alexander, an agent in Orlando. “You find maggots. The swimming pools are green. The lawns dry up. They’re eyesores. Neighbors yell at us to water the lawn.”
[CNN]
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I think there are a lot of reasons people won’t buy a house that needs major renovations, like all-new kitchen and bath, even if it’s a “deal”
Lots of people want a house that’s in move-in condition. They don’t have time, energy, or knowledge to do the renovations. Buying a house often coincides with other big life-change events, like a cross-country move, having a baby, getting married – major home improvements don’t easily fit in. And since you can’t really live in a house with no bathroom or kitchen, that means you have to carry two mortgages or pay rent and a mortgage until it’s livable.
And don’t forget that buying a house is often driven by emotions, not always rational ones. I’ve seen plenty of those HGTV shows where people are influenced by cheap, easily changeable things like appliances or interior paint color. It’s hard to fall in love with a house with no kitchen or bathrooms when the realtor/flippers mantra is that “kitchens and baths sell homes”.
We’ve been thinking about upgrading (three kids, three bedrooms, not enough space) and since we have a ton of equity and payments we can afford, now seems like the time to look for a four or five BR house. Went and looked at a couple of stinkers around Skokie. They all suck. Poorly maintained and just plain garbage. One, a five bedroom, had a visible hole in the roof & corner of the house where animals had chewed through and were clearly nesting in the attic. The pool was more like a mosquito-slash-algae farm. There were holes in the walls and the kitchen cabinets were half gone. They wanted half a million for it. Every step we took through the house uncovered more problems. I have my own inspector and he wouldn’t have stepped foot into the house without a hazmat suit. And we live in a good neighborhood.
I have a hand in the acquisition of 500 to 1,000 houses a year for the government. The number of “dumps” is significantly higher than in the recent past.
One of these days I am going to fill out the paperwork to write a couple of articles on what I learn on the job.
@zolielo: I’d like to read that paper. should be very interesting.
And at the end a congressional bill to spend 4 BILLION DOLLARS to clean up somebody else’s mess wither it be the banks or realtors.
AND I have empathy but no sympathy for those who are crying ‘they’re dragging down our value-Pfffft! most of you weren’t crying when you COULD of sold your house for 3 times what it’s worth.
If the banks want those houses that bad go in there and clean em up.I understand stuff like plumbing but whose to say the evictee didn’t buy the missing appliances-that’s how probably got evicted anyway-buying those nifty appliances you see on the fiip shows on over extended high interest bearing credit.
i just bought a house. i think like alot of people here i am addicted to bargains. (value not just low price!) we went to house after house where the quality would be described as bad to worse.
we finally found one that seemed to be a weird situation. it was HUD owned, but not thoroughly trashed. we think the previous owners traded HUD for another HUD home elsewhere in the US. but yeah, virually every other foreclosed home was in a terrible state. stains on the carpet that you dont want to know what it is, the same with marks on the wall. things missing that were taken by the previous owners. just awful.
ours was in relatively excellent shape. the bushes were waaaay over grown but the carpet is good, paint is great. so i am very happy.
Crap homes still sell in New York for a minimum of half a million bucks.
The wife and I bought our first home a few months ago, in a neighborhood that, while nice[1], was really suffering a lot of short sales and foreclosures.
I would say that of the 7 or so houses we saw, one was in good shape, another was in OK shape, and the other five were just trashed. No surprise, the correlation was renting them out without paying for proper maintenance.
We actually jumped on that good house, and got it for what I think was a fair sum of money (it had a near-perfect home inspection!). Now, we’re happy home-owners and glad we made the jump. I sure could not have put my home theater in my apartment.
[1] It really is a nice place – just had a lot of, um, recent immigrants who got loans they couldn’t afford, and thought that the rental market was a lot better than it was. I’m understanding why there are occupancy laws now, and HOAs.
They weren’t kidding when they said the housing market is depressed.
We bought a house seven years ago that was a rental house for 27 years.
Yes, it needed work. We knew that going in. Sweat equity was called for; we did it. New kitchen, new bathroom, sunroom, garage.
There’s still more to do, but it’s a 1926 Arts & Craft. It was built well in the first place, and it’s a testament to the way it was built that it’s still standing and habitable.
We paid $140k for it then; it appraises to the city for $189k. We could sell it tomorrow for $350k, now, today. Nope. We can walk to a major university, banking, pharmacy, and a host of restaurants.
Even if we move, we’ll keep it.
I wonder if a bank will even try to sell a house that his been stripped of all of it’s copper? You hear about people breaking into abandoned homes and stealing all of the metal (which amazes me if you think about the strength of the US steel industry only 50 years ago).
Hopefully, with fuel prices being so high, we’ll see a revitalization in our metals industrial sector, but I wonder how stripped you can really sell a house? If I walked into a property and saw that I needed to spend another $50K just to make the place livable, I’d ask for at least that much off of the sticker price.
I live in Florida and have seen a few of these homes in my neighborhood. It doesn’t take long for a pool to turn green (and become a mosquito magnet). My parents are unlucky enough to live right next door to a distressed property and have taken to mowing the front lawn just to preserve appearances.
If you have a homeowner’s association, you can use that as a mechanism to get a bank to maintain the property. Depending upon the deed restrictions, a homeowners association usually has the power to impose liens on the property that it can then foreclose on if the property is not maintained in accordance with the association’s standards. Usually, these liens can be imposed against a bank or other lender who has obtained the property through foreclosure.
If you don’t have a homeowner’s association, many cities and counties have local codes and ordinances regulating overgrowth and other “unsafe” conditions on properties. If the bank is not maintaining a property near you, try calling your local code enforcement agency to make a report. Be as specific as possible (but don’t lie) and be ready to read off a litany of violations observed on the distressed property. If your report is investigated and the property is found to have violations, the record owner of the property will be noticed and required to cure them. Failure to cure will ordinarily result in the imposition of fines, which will continue to accrue until either paid and cured or the City/County forecloses on their code enforcement lien and sells the property at auction to collect (foreclosing on the forecloser – an interesting turn of events).
Unfortunately, you’ll have to be patient as many code enforcement officers are understandably overwhelmed at this point.
I am currently looking at properties. This is very true. A good number of properties we have looked at are either bank owned or short sale. The short sales tend to be better deals because often the people are still keeping the house nice. We have seen some pretty freaky houses that are bank owned. now I don’t mind fixing up a place, but often these places aren’t discounted enough to make it worth my while.
I’m not surprised the featured quote is from Orlando. Most of the homes here are trash to begin with.
In the L.A. area the reports of West Nile virus are up this summer due to abandoned pools. Talk about your tangent consequences.