House For Sale Oddities

[purplefdu]

We've looked at a couple of those foreclosures without pipes. We fell in love with one actually. A nice older lady had her kids and friends (read carnies) move in with her and never pay the bills. After she died and there was no more money they stripped the house of everything but the vintage metal fireplace grates and actual furnace in the crawl space. Pipes, metal door edges, etc. It did have an airplane hanger and 3 acres with an in ground pool though. DH wanted the hanger as workspace like you can't believe. Got bought by a contractor for 50k over the lowest asking price since he didn't search enough. Fool.

We have also seen plenty of single family homes with wheels. I'd like to break the skull of realtors trying to pull that one on people.

My favorite to date was one listed as "pets encouraged" it was a foreclosure in the bad part of town, completely gutted and gross. The pets part was explained simply as "raise your own roach farm"...ick. Meanwhile with its .08 acres one parking space off street and two bedroom/crawl space/one bathroom they still want almost 150k for it...

My grandparents had a similar farm shower. Their home is circar 1900, and although it now includes two full bathrooms, it did at one time only include the shower in the cellar which has only a raised concrete-like lip to keep the water toward the drain and a curtain on a pole. When they moved in during the 50s it did have bathrooms though.

[nemraca]

This is funny. I see I have my work cut out for me when we start looking at houses soon. I do know that most foreclosures in bad conditions are in those conditions because of the owners being a bit resentful. I can understand but they need to understand that by doing so and lowering the value of their home they will be stuck with the difference unless they sign a no recourse disclosure which a lot of people do not know about.

[faeryedark]

I went with a friend house hunting once, and we found the mater bedroom had a stripper pole in it.
This was actually a rental and the owner was like "oh yeah, I forgot to mention that"

[jillynoodle]

oh i love the "handyman specials" when we were looking. i think instead of handyman special they should write "needs at least 100,000 and a crew of ten to make this place livable because someone decided to rip everything out including the walls and not finish it" I have seen it all since we were on a seriuosly lowest budget for buying a house and my husband and i can do home improvements so we looked at everything and wow its sad what some of these houses the condition we saw!!! i was always told when u find "the house for u" u will know...i thought it was a bunch of bull till thats exactly what happened!! i just knew it and we have lived here for about 6 years now

[CW&M Mom]

Most of the houses around here...only sell for about 50K...but you could easily find a 1 or 2 bedroom house for less than 10K and it actually be fixable.

We also looked at one house without a furnace *sigh* it would of been nice otherwise.

What I don't get is that people dont get that there house smells like cat pee and think that it's going to sell. ick...really why on earth would I buy a house that smells that gross.

My house is a 100 year old victorian...and it has a shower in the basement (the water runs onto the cement floor and goes to the sub pump.

My Dh has already used it...when he was fixing our shower and didn't want to use the claw foot tub. It kind of looks like those showers in your old Science Class in school....you know the ones in case you get something in your eye...but the teachers tells you you better never ever use it LOL.

[saving-n-va]

Unfortunately many foreclosures are torn up on purpose. I guess some (not all in this situation) people think "well if I can keep it I'm gonna tear it up for the next person". We have been using "buyers agent" realtor to help us look for a place. He is looking out for our best interests, and not trying to sell his own listings etc. He doesn't do many listings since it could be a conflict of interest. We have seen some that have great land, crappy houses (as in foundations cracking...etc) and some homes that have actually been taken care of that are foreclosures. My advice to those of you looking for a place is to find a realtor to represent you. Then you aren't dealing with a bunch of different ones. Let them check out the houses first if possible. Our guy even pointed out some that had water damage or drainage issues and said..."no you don't want this one look at this...."

Something to remember on the a/c units being ripped out. Those were probably stolen after the house went on the market. I can't tell you how many we looked at had the entire a/c unit ripped out of the outside wall. People steal them for the copper. And it can even happen to your house you live in too, saw it a few times when we lived in FL.

In our search we figure it this way - carpets WILL BE replaced so we don't even look at what is already in there, paint colors will be changed so if its an orange and poopy brown walls - they will be changed, so overlook it. We look for a solid foundation, structure, good roof, a/c unit still there, check for water damage...etc. Everything else can be changed. We know when buying a foreclosure we WILL have to do work on it.