Posted on 04/01/2008 7:08:25 PM PDT by blam
Metal pipes worth more than some US homes
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 2:19am BST 02/04/2008
Copper pipes and wiring found in many of America's repossessed homes are now more valuable than the properties themselves.
Across the country thieves are stripping empty houses of the copper, aluminium, and brass in their plumbing and heating systems to take advantage of the crashing property market and the soaring price of scrap metal, much of which is sold to China and India.
The trend has accelerated as the glut of unwanted properties clog the market, dragging down house prices.
"Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process," said Tony Brancatelli, a city councillor in Cleveland, Ohio, which has been particularly hard hit.
He added that some "distressed houses that should not be recycled" were changing hands for as little as £50, while other boarded-up homes now have "No copper, only PVC" painted outside to deter thieves.
Marc Charney, an estate agent in Brockton, Massachusetts, said that thieves had stripped all the copper from one property he was about to sell, cutting its value by £2,500.
At least 15 US states have recently drafted laws to address the problem, from tightening rules on scrap traders to imposing tougher penalties for metal theft.
oh double barf!
>> Copper pipes and wiring found in many of America’s repossessed homes are now more valuable than the properties themselves.
Aw, horse $h!t!!!
This is grocery-store checkout-line tabloid nonsense.
Really hard to believe unless the property is wrecked. Maybe they are talking about a run down double-wide with a large copper still in back.
Perhaps in meth neighborhoods in Detroit.
Make them prove it.
Question in readers columns.
Get quotes from, homeowners, in other words beat them at their own game.
Brits are liars????? Guess that speaks for itself.
It’s true that thieves are breaking in and stripping the copper pipes and wiring from empty houses in some parts of the country.
But I doubt very much that what they take is worth more than the house. The thieves can’t very well make off with the house, so they take what they can, probably to feed their drug habits.
That happened in the South Bronx in NYC during the last big commodities boom. The result was a lot of wrecked houses.
Unfortunately, it's already happening in Minneapolis. I don't see anywhere that the metal was worth more than the house. It's theives taking advantage of vacant houses, period.
That's where the posted article in full of BS.
Here's a link to a local Minneapolis story:
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S391988.shtml?cat=206
Me thinks one average month of property taxes is worth more than the copper in a house.
Thieves also steel copper wires from electrical substations. By the same logic, does this mean that the copper is more valuable than the electrical substations are?
“The thieves can’t very well make off with the house”
Give them time...
Agreed.
There was a Sanford & Son episode back in the 1970’s about a crook stealing copper pipes...
He stole Sanford’s pipes and sold them back to him...
How can the pipes be worth more than the property when they are a subset of the property?
This is such BS. You pull a couple hundred pounds of copper pipes out of a house and get about $3 per pound.
The pipes aren’t made of gold.
Actually, it had already occurred to me that if, as some people think, we are going to end up with millions of empty houses, and at the same time we are going to have millions of illegal aliens, combining the two would be a marriage made in . . . somewhere.
Especially since we have banks that will give out No Job, No Down payment loans to anyone and then wonder why they can’t repay it.
Believe me, crackheads and meth heads will strip the wires and steal the metals for $$ for another hit. I know of a couple here locally who are both addicted to crack cocaine. Their house burned down a few months ago. They went back to the house and stripped the wires, got the metal and sold it. These are two people who wouldn’t do an honest day’s work if they had to.
Some theives ripped out about 5,000 worth of copper wire from my families old chicken houses. It is being done all over the country. They cut the fenses and the cows were out on the highway.
I don’t know about being worth more than the entire home, but I know this does happen. Back a few years ago I was looking at some cheap repoed property to fix up and rent out. One home I looked at had been stripped clean by the prior owner... and I mean STRIPPED CLEAN! They took the carpets, they took all the interior doors, they took the sinks, toilets and plumbing, they removed all the light fixtures, outlets, switches, breaker box and even pulled most of the wiring out of the walls. The house was just nothing more than empty shell. I don’t know a whole lot about property law but I hope their mortgage company went after them for something, the only way they could have done more damage was to burn the place down...
And better add..."sitting on a rented lot." Land is still land.
The Senate Chamber? Some place in DC anyway.
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