Good, at least we are in agreement. baretta need not think about the poor homeowners as you need not think about the situations and conditions which brought us to this point.

Ostriches we are.

Really? Buying a home with no money down is the fix for this crisis? I thought that's how we got here in the first place.

I guess they don't have the term SLUM Lord in CA. When Bubba and his extended family move into that rental unit next to your home let me know how it feel.

If you are not going to sink some money into a down payment for a house, what make you think he is going to throw some money into fixing it?

Let see, Berettafan has another house across the street, is he going to move there or is he buying houses as a speculator? Buying a house with no money down is just a continuation of past practices that got our economy to the current situation.

Well I certainly don’t think he went through the trouble to find the house, QUALIFY for a new
mortgage on an investment property (much harder to get if not you PR) and then proceed to never make a payment on it?

Wheres the fun in that?

I got some Bubba’s that bought a house across the street from me…they annoy
me, hope they move soon :mad:

Ruf i certainly did wonder about the previous owner when i visited the house yesterday. It had been vacated for some time. I feel badly for him but did nothing to hasten his loss. I did not call the bank while he still owned it and make an offer or any such thing. I will be keeping an eye on the houses around it as more may come up and the best thing i could do now is to protect my investment by bringing other homes on the street up the the standard of this one.

And while i am not writing a check to aquire this house I certainly am not throwing the dice on it. Fact is rent on this should be in the $800 - $850 range. It fits my strategy perfectly for several reasons;
-it was built after 1978 so no lead paint issues
-it is a 3/1 rancher so the structure is simple to assess and service.
-it has baseboard heat which is very low cost to maintain (if not run) and is also low risk (vs. propane, etc).
-it is one street over from the middle school (which my wife happens to teach at)
-there is a brand new development at the end of the street (about 2 houses down) full of similar ranchers.
-it is, essentially, a starter home. there will, IMO, always be a market for starter homes.
-it has newer carpet, new storm doors, new front porch and a nice fenced back yard. it only needs paint and a new fridge to be ready to go.

By the way, i visited with my tenant at the other house while i was there and talked with him about the new roof we just put on the house he is in.

Some of these guys are darn right when they say that an empty repo house is bad mojo for a neighborhood. It is not what anybody needs.

As mentioned we are hoping to get a shot at some other homes on that street that look horrible. One next door is a terrible eyesore and if we could pick it up for $50k or so we could essentially help everybody on that street by fixing it up.

Exactly... those neighbors who ARE keeping up with their mortgage payments are probably overjoyed that something is happening to the empty, bank-owned house in their neighborhood. That's good karma IMHO.

Like I said in some previous posts I am not judging you. I know that an empty house could be bad mojo for a neighborhood, but at the same time I also know that renters are completely different from homeowners. The fact that the house was in very good condition with a lot of NEW improvements indicates to me that a HOMEOWNER lived there and not a RENTER. I would not like to move into a single family association and find out that all my neighbors are renter and not actual homeowners.

From those of us who rent, thank you for the sweeping generalization about our "type." SmileWavy

Good memory. It's nice to know my posts are actually read by someone. :) But, that doesn't change a thing. I am sorry that it happened to them. However, I won't hold that against the next guy that buys the house. I agree that I would rather have a buyer live there than a renter (especially one like Todd), but, as others have said, I would rather it were bought and rented vs vacant. I plan on selling in 2 years. I don't want a bunch of vacant homes dragging down my home value.

BF really isn't the bad guy here. Maybe part of the problem with all of us is we need a bad guy to blame when there really isn't one. Guys like BF, who come out on top, end up being the scapegoat (often because of jealousy) even though he had absolutely nothing to do with the former owners loss of the house. In fact, he's helping the economy by making the bank's investment viable again, which is good for all of us. To be honest, it has me thinking of doing the same thing.

I've been renting the same house for 18 years.

No stress.

I will say that if I bought a house a few years back, I would have lost it now.
No doubt about that at all.

My goal is to stay put for as long as possible.


KT

you've spoken with my neighbors, eh? Rat bastards...I think there might be some vacancies in my building soon. :p

+1

Oh come on, you know you are that "type!" :p

You are welcome Nostatic

It is not a sweeping generalization. Renting vs. owning is taken in considerations on a lot of thing, for example why do they ask that on a car insurance application, or on a loan application?

I see nothing wrong with buying the house at a price that the bank accepted. They will work on the loss and that is the banks, and now the taxpayers, problem.

What I do see wrong is a no-money up front purchase, this practice cause some of the problems that is going on now.
If anyone wants to purchase a business investment, then it should be their or their company money. Or some significant portion of the buying price.
In this case, you did not purchase anything, the bank (or lender) did. Whether they feel like taking the risk is up to them. They take the responsibility, you can walk away.

I never said that BF was a bad guy. If people would just read my first post I just ask that he think about the family that was there before, however, after reading some of BF posts I think he knew more about the house than what he has let on.

He has another house across the street so he must have known that this house was on the market. Since the house had a lot of improvement done to it it is easy to say that a homeowner and not a renter (sorry Todd) occupied the house. Like most home owners that are in a bind I am sure that he would have tried to sell the house before foreclosure and that BF must have known the house across from him was forsale. I'm sure BF knew that a homeowner own the house and not some drug dealer, or speculator, or person that die as some had alluded to.

Granted he didn't need to make an offer to the original owner, but like a previous poster had said Vultures are the one that pick over the carcass.

As for vacant homes dragging down the housing market, I think that the market is already down because of this mess.

Welcome to being a businessman ruf-porsche!

The person who bought the house they can't afford that you feel sorry for is the person to blame here- not BF. Their willingness to buy a house at a price they can not afford (or decided they were not going to pay any longer even if they could afford it) is the problem.

New improvements to the house he just bought could mean the previous owner was a flipper, or if it actually was a homeowner occupied property that they purchased these improvements on credit cards/home depot loans that they never could afford to begin with and never paid back either.

There used to be public hangings for these type of people you feel bad for.



If BF didn't buy it at that price the bank would have to go even lower. BF is the hero of the housing market here, not the villain.