Living After Foreclosure

Abandoned houses attract a lot of things: partying teenagers, mice, rocks through the windows, the elements.

Now, with the houses rotting away in varying states in the foreclosure process, these houses are now attracting black-market commodities dealers.  The houses are broken into and stripped of their copper pipes and wires.  Copper has quintupled in price over the past three years, making it worth the risk for thieves.

Needless to say, pulling out plumbing does not improve the chances that a house will be sold.

Parties responsible for the properties are aware of the problem and trying to prevent further reduction in the homes’ values by posting signs like “No Copper Only PVC” on the house.  This reminded me of a walk through New York City one time.  Some cars parked on the side of the road had signs like “No Radio — Thank You” in them.  (”Thanks for breaking into the car next to me.”)

“No Copper.  Thank you!”

• HUD tips for avoiding foreclosure: Part 3 The US Department of Housing and Urban Development has some good advice for people that are in danger of losing their home through foreclosure. Here are the last three tips from that list, with some discussion. Use your assets. "Do you have assets-a second car, jewelry, a whole life insurance......
• Luxury homes see a big jump in foreclosures This is just for the Dallas-Fort Worth area but the number of foreclosures filed against $1-million-plus homes more than doubled this past year. One hundred twelve percent higher for the first six months of this year compared to last year, to be exact. As for slightly less-expensive homes, the increases......
• Do you have any friends facing foreclosure? Even though it's hard to go more than a few days without hearing about the housing slump and foreclosures, it's a bit of a distant concept if no one you know has faced it. Well, over the past couple of weeks we took a "love offering" at our church for......
• Now we have to worry about our neighbor's finances This article by Liz Pulliam Weston, entitled Foreclosure Nearby?  It's your problem, brings up the "friendly fire" aspect of foreclosures:  a foreclosure nearby hurts everyone in the neighborhood, not just the personl foreclosed on. A neighbor who's in financial trouble probably is worried about their house, but it's almost certain......

• What would you do? The house is a little rougher than we expected Photo by: fabbio On Friday, I wrote about a foreclosed home we found on the internet and were going to visit over the weekend. The house is on 16.5 acres of land, is approximately 4,200 square foot including the basement, has 5 bedrooms, a huge external shop and a......
• Housing Update Interesting update on some markets from the Real Estate Journal. Utah homes worth their salt Utah apparently has missed the news about the end of the housing boom, with median selling prices on the way up. For example, Utah County's Alpine area saw median selling prices rise 57.2% to $529,000......
• How To Save Hundreds Of Dollars On Your Tax Bill By Challenging Your Property Taxes After reading on some other blogs how the bloggers had successfully challenged their property tax assessments, saving them hundreds of dollars every year, I decided that it was time that I give it it a shot as well. Our assessed property value last year was almost $20,000 higher than we......
• How will new houses hold up? My wife went to a church retreat this weekend in the Virginia Beach area.  The church still had some time left on the rental (they had paid through today at 10 AM) so there was some time for others (like myself) to come down to enjoy the house for a......