On Tuesday morning one of my buyer clients called me about one of the listings she had received in her morning email from my MLS search service. "There has to be something wrong with this house," she said, "but I'm really curious to see it."
The house she was speaking of is a 1,650 square foot raised ranch with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms on a 1/4 acre in a lovely Stamford neighborhood. The listing agent's remarks said,
"Unbelievable - Must See. Looking For Fast Sale! Prequal Required."
Photos of the house's exterior showed some curb appeal and a large, level backyard with a big deck. So far, so good. But then the red flags starting popping up:
- There were no pictures of the interior
- A big red flag because the list price is $319,900 (Comparable homes have recently sold for an average of $616,000.)
So the question became is there something really wrong with this house or is the kind of bargain they talk about on all of those late-night infomercials?
We made an appointment to go see the house on Wednesday evening. In the meantime I did my homework to see if I could learn more about the house. The tax records on the MLS showed that it's been bank-owned since 2005, not surprising. A previous MLS listing from 2002 made me truly concerned because the remarks stated "Home Shifted When Settled. Needs To Be Raised/New Foundation." That's a significant issue - had it been fixed since 2002? If not, why wasn't this mentioned in the new MLS listing?
When we went to the house last night, all of our questions were answered. From the front steps you could tell that the whole house was tilted backwards. The tilt got increasingly worse as you moved from the front to the back of the house. It felt like we were in a fun house at a carnival or had gone through the looking glass with Alice. And there were more problems...the kitchen appliances had all been ripped out, the deck was unfinished, a bedroom and bathroom had been built in half of the 1-car garage and more. This house was a disaster and couldn't likely be lived in without a lot of work and money invested into fixing the problems. The saddest part of the whole thing was that it was obvious that someone had put a lot of money into the house before it went into foreclosure - there were new cabinets in the kitchen, an expanded bathroom with a large jacuzzi tub, a stone patio, a brand new deck and other improvements.
All I could think was that this house had been built in 1963 so when it last sold in 2002 it must have been just as tilted as it was when I saw it yesterday. How could any real estate agent, home inspector or mortgage bank have allowed someone to buy a property with so many problems? Did the last buyers intend to fix the structural problems and then find it was too expensive? Or did they just decide they could live on a tilt? Who knows? It's just one of those things that boggles my mind.
Thankfully my clients have good senses of humor and we had a few good laughs at the house's expense. They know that finding any house in their price range in Stamford is a real long shot so they wanted to be sure they weren't missing out on a real opportunity. The best part of the meeting was that they had a chance to see first hand that more often than not, deals like this really are too good to be true.
I'll be keeping an eye on this house to see what happens. It will be interesting to see if they can actually get it sold. | 
RSS Blog Feed
