Posted on 11/07/2008 6:37:53 PM PST by Lorianne
It’s a given that in a slumping market home prices are going to decline. But $1 for a house intown?
Apparently, even the huge U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development can grow exasperated trying to sell a single home. So sometimes it dangles the offer of a buck.
The catch —- there’s always a catch —- is that the buyer must be a local government wanting to create affordable housing.
“Hey, I got this house for $1. Call the I.G.,” joked Stephanie Parker, a senior single-family housing specialist with HUD who was showing a dollar home on Sims Street in southwest Atlanta. (I.G. is short for the inspector general, who looks into shenanigans.)
Dollar homes are part of HUD’s growing inventory of foreclosed properties, the result of defaults on FHA-insured mortgages. HUD homes in Georgia grew 39 percent from September 2007 to September 2008. Sixty percent of HUD’s 3,000-plus Georgia homes are in six metro Atlanta counties.
The dollar home program predates the housing meltdown, but it has become more active because of escalating foreclosures. Governments nationwide used to buy about 100 such homes a year, according to HUD. This year that number has more than tripled in 10 months.
Still, 100-cent homes remain scarce. In Atlanta just two were on the market last month. HUD decides a buck is better than nothing after waiting at least 180 days. The government has owned the Sims Street house since July 2007, courtesy of Wells Fargo.
The lender gave the house to HUD when the borrower, who had bought the property in 2000 for $84,000, quit making payments.
HUD paid Wells Fargo the loan balance, then had an appraisal done, which turned out to be $50,000. After that, it tried selling the house through PEMCO Ltd., the company contracted to dispose of HUD homes in Georgia.
If HUD could kick itself, it probably would.
It rejected three investor offers: one for $23,000 and two for $14,000.
The last offer was in June. After a while, $1 started to look pretty good.
Why does it have to be a government. Sell it to me for $1 and I can do something with it.
Didn’t someone recently buy a house in Detroit for a dollar?
Then didn’t the person find out he/she has to pay about four thousand dollars a year in property tax?
Let the buyer beware....
There was one in Atlanta where they turned down $20,000+ to turn around and sell it for a dollar... very sad.
You see people the government will make back all our money plus a profit from the bailout in no time at all...
Does anyone STILL believe that YOU the taxpayers are still going to make a KILLING with the government in the mortgage business?
LOL!
Screwed again.
YOU paid more than $1.00 for THAT house.
LOL. You betcha
Baltimore did the same thing and after 10 years, it’s stabilized. At first, there were pie-eyed libs looking to gentrify the area. They lost. Now, it’s people with their eyes wide open, and they’re making a stand. One of those “great locations, but don’t go out after dark” places is now safe enough to walk to an O’s game if you take a cab back. One guy I know bought a house just a block from the water and right near the harbor bike path. He’s doing fine. Another guy I know bought an old store/warehouse near John Hopkins, converted part to living quarters and the rest to his art studio. He rents out the extra space to two other artists and is doing fine. Both of them have steel across the windows, steel doors, and steel under their pillows, but they haven’t had any trouble, except for minor vandalism, since they moved in years ago. No cars on the property, of course. Both of them paid a dollar for the property.
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