Comments on: Foreclosed Home For Sale For Just $1

By: marvelly

marvelly — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:11:19 +0000

How do acquire about buy a house for a dollar

By: Michele Schamp

Michele Schamp — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:32:47 +0000

Sustainable solutions...

In these run down, high-crime areas there should be something you could do for the neighborhood. For a dollar you could maybe make a park or use shipping containers to build low-income apartments. This type of construction may be just what is needed for secure, vandalism resistant homes.

By: Lee Smith

Lee Smith — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:54:56 +0000

It would prolly cost you 10k to tear the house down, and at that price you are going to get the cheapest demolition guy, who is prolly going to contaminate the soil(lead paint, asbestos, etc). Then when you decide to sell the land, it's going to be worth even less, cause the buyer will have to scrape the top 1-3 feet of soil(if he's lucky) to get to good soil. Any idea how much it costs to get rid of contaminated soil?!? Plus, property taxes would still hit you for the land itself.

If you left the house there, you would get cited by the city for it not passing code, or being a blight on the neighborhood(they dont care if the rest of the neighborhood is in crap shape, you just bought the house, so they know where you live and can cite you!) If you were cited for not passing code, you have a limited time to get the home up to code, or you pay ever increasing fees until you do get it up to code.. I have heard of fees in the hundreds if not thousands per day.

Lets say the house has mold?! Then you have to remediate the mold, and pray that the house hasn't been placed on the insurance blacklist.... Heck, even if it doesnt have mold, you still have to pray the house isn't on the insurance blacklist.. One over zealous owner can get a home blacklisted for 5-10 years.

I went and looked at a home that was listed at 10k.. In great shape the home was worth 40-50k, but it had been in a fire and needed 40k in repairs. The bank was hoping someone would take the problem off their hands. I assume because they didnt want to pay the fees to tear the house down, or fix it, or pay the citations coming due!

People think how can a house go for $1?!? Well, cause no one wants it at that price.. Too many headaches, not enough cash.

By: superbad

superbad — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:14:05 +0000

The difference between a place like Brixton and Detroit is simple: as shitty as Brixton was for a while, it was still a short commute to one of the most desirable pieces of real estate in the world, central London. Detroit is a dying city with lots of redundant housing stock built during the good times when there were plenty of jobs. Now the jobs have gone forever, and the population has crashed. The bulk of Detroit's population is made up of people who can't afford to move somewhere else. Not a recipe for a revival.

A lot of these places aren't coming back, ever. Within a couple decades they will revert to forest land after the stripped, abandoned houses fall down or are torched. The reason you can't give these properties away (literally) is because they are a liability rather than an asset, and there is no sign that is likely to change.

As for renegotiating the mortgage: this is an asset that is literally worth nothing. A mortgage on it is therefore essentially an unsecured loan, most likely made to someone with terrible credit. And with a low interest rate and other terms that are much more favorable to the debtor than you would normally get with an unsecured loan. It's dead weight on the balance sheet. Better to take the pain now and cut it loose.

By: _Jon

_Jon — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:42:44 +0000

Nobody is living in these houses. They are abandoned.
The property taxes on that house are probably $2,000 per year - even in its destroyed condition.

Even if the new owner fixed it up, she would need a security guard to protect it during the remodel and before it became rented.

This may be news to the rest of the world, but here in Detroit, we just shrug.

By: Shish

Shish — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:21:29 +0000

This is what happens when you have a lot of bank foreclosures. It happened in Britain at the end of the 1980s. People would hang out at the court and the moment a foreclosure order was made, they'd head off to the property with a truck and strip it of everything valuable. The former owner didn't care, and the new owner wouldn't find out until later. It happened with a house I had an interest in. I stopped by a few hours after the foreclosure and found water pouring out under the front door. Someone had ripped out all the plumbing - boiler, radiators, bath, sinks, even the toilets, without bothering to turn the water off.

After that went on for a few months the banks started negotiating with the homeowners instead of evicting them, as Wilde suggested above.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:01:45 +0000

I'll go as high as 75 cents.

By: Skipweasel

Skipweasel — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:00:54 +0000

A large proportion of the private carparking spaces in the UK are provided by a firm called National Car Parks. They got started after the war, buying up bombsites. In some cases their investments didn't pay off for several decades, some only recently. However bad the area there's always a chance it'll rise again one day. Hey, even Brixton, once one of the most slummy bits of London is now sought after again - returning to its status in Sherlock Holmes' day; Electric Avenue is so called because it was the first road in London to have electric street lighting - hardly a slum feature.

By: LisaL

LisaL — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:51:16 +0000

Took so long to sell b/c who the hell would want to live in an area where the house was freakin stripped down to nothing. I bet they would've taken the walls if they could've carried them out. Freakin thieving bastards.

By: Sid Morrison

Sid Morrison — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:04:57 +0000

@Sammy-
Well, yes you could, but it would be safer living outside of "the green zone" in Bagdad with an Israeli flag flying at your front door.

By: Sammy

Sammy — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:56:04 +0000

Its a pretty cute little house!
And if you buy if for a dollar, you could afford to fix it up

By: Wilde

Wilde — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:28:23 +0000

It would have been cheaper for the bank to just let the old homeowner occupy it until they could afford the mortgage again, or refinance it into lower monthly payments for the old owner.

By: Rene ala Carte

Rene ala Carte — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:52:46 +0000

My home town!

Really, it wasn't always like this.

By: Sid Morrison

Sid Morrison — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:29:27 +0000

@Skipweasel-
Yes, in the US, except in rare curculstances, buying a house includes title to the land. You go awry a little in a couple places though because you are assuming Detroit is like anywhere else in the civilized world. It is not.
1. You still pay some property taxes on the land, albeit less when there is no house on it. But the property taxes are based on the overall value of the property, so a house that is worth nothing adds little to the value of the property or the tax bill.
2. You've probably never been to Detroit. It's a hellhole and you will be holding onto that property for an ETERNITY before you can sell it for more. All that time you'll be paying taxes and probably insurance (if you are smart) to protect yourself from getting sued by a crackwhore who cuts herself on a broken bottle or something.
3. There is an ENORMOUS supply of cheap property in Detroit -- it's not like this one place got magically undervalued or something.

By: MoonCake

MoonCake — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:12:43 +0000

ohh i'm gonna have to put that on my credit card...

By: Skipweasel

Skipweasel — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:13:49 +0000

I don't know how the American housing market operates, but does this include title to the land? If so, demolish the house so you don't have to pay property taxes and sit on it for a few years until it's worth something again.

By: Neatoramawontsendmeapassword

Neatoramawontsendmeapassword — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:32:32 +0000

Wish I had known about that. An equivalent property here goes for about 500,000 times that price, if not more.

What a bargain! (I don't know if I'd be crazy about the neighbours, though...)

By: Johnny Cat

Johnny Cat — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:49:11 +0000

Instant equity indeed. I would have paid many more pennies for the dirt alone.