Real Estate Investing

I love seeing new listings in the summer.  Especially when it’s clear sellers love their yards and gardens.  First on our tour, though, is a house NOT for sale.  Bill at Bill’s Tennessee Paradise shows us his beautiful pool area.  Click through the link to see a couple more gorgeous photos.

More summer homes …

I love a back porch - especially when it’s screened in to keep out the mosquitoes and flies!

And what’s better than a screened in porch?  A shaded front porch with a big swing …

I also like a fenced in yard…

Say no more … I’ve found me a a hammock under a shade tree.

As one commenter said, “What do you expect from a $9 per hour employee?”

In Milwaukee, more and more banks are guilty of “walkaways” … they foreclose and evict homeowners for delinquent mortgage payments and then - instead of putting the house back on the market for sale … THEY WALK AWAY.

John Mulkey, a real estate blogger from Georgia, said,

What’s happening is a crime—perhaps not legally, but figuratively. Sometimes it’s a crime against the very people who have already suffered the most; and other times it’s a crime against neighborhoods trying to recover from issues of high crime and drug dealing. In the words of Catherine Doyle, attorney with the Milwaukee Legal Aid Society, “This is just the meanest and nastiest thing (lenders) could do. Even more profound is the terrible damage to the community.”

Go read his entire post because I couldn’t agree with him more.  I’m only able to share a small part of his post because of copyright issues, but it’s definitely worth a full read. From John stating that banks are taking one last shot at homeowners to this activity being egregious on a monumental scale. Also read through the comments section to see it’s happening all over the country - from Wisconsin to Arizona - banks don’t want to take title.  One commenter said,

Even bulldozed, these pieces of Real Estate will still need to have a marketable title, which seems to be a big problem. I can imagine that title insurance for this kind of situation should sky rocket. When a bad impact on the communities and all the future home owners!

Another commenter added this would’ve been a good opportunity to pass the homes to Habitat for Humanity. I think some banks / lenders need to look at the bigger picture and see how their actions are affecting neighborhoods and the good they COULD do if they’d use some common sense.

Photo by Editor B via Flickr Creative Commons.

A colleague of mine recently posted on her Facebook account her perfect homebuyer story. Dawne Davis of Bob Parks Realty LLC said,

I’m celebrating my clients’ “perfect” new homebuyer story. Robyn and Allen Robertson just closed on a brand new home (priced well below market value at $73.00 per sqft!) and actually netted $8000 in the process. The builder, in an effort to get inventory sold, offered an incentive that paid $10,000 of their closing expenses, AND they received their $1,000 earnest funds back at closing, so they got into the…

Dawne added in the footnote that the home even appraised for $10,000 more than the sales price.

Like Dawne, there are a few of my favorite homebuyer stories.  One couple found a beautiful home that backed to a creek, there was a horse barn and some acreage to go along with the house that was all-brick, had gorgeous bamboo floors, and a great design.  Yes there were a couple of little snags that we worked through, but the best part was that the appraisal came in at $30,000 over the list price.  That was a good day.

Another great buyer searched for six months. My very realistic estimate on the number of houses we saw is over 100.  But we found her home.  It has a certain appeal in that a married couple lived there most of their lives and we think the ghost of the man still visits.  There’s an old greenhouse that nature is slowly reclaiming.  A workshop also sits behind the house and it smells like my grandfather’s old machine shop.  It’s a home brimming with memories.  What makes this such a great home buyer story?  My buyer - as famous as famous gets in the Nashville society of bloggers and their blogs - is blogging about the surprises she discovers in her yard every week.  She bought the home in the fall so we had no idea about what kind of plants and flowers would burst forth in the spring.

And now we’re finding she also has crawdads.

What have you discovered in your house or yard?