BuyRenovatedForeclosures.com

As someone who has fixed up a lot of properties throughout my career, I sometimes take for granted the real difficulty of it, thinking that it’s not such a big deal. Just don’t ask me to load songs onto an iPod or software onto my computer — that is as traumatic for me as things could possibly be!

Well, over the past year I realized that not everyone has had the good fortune of cleaning up really nasty properties and transforming them into vibrant, nice homes for a new owner/family. What really opened my eyes was the experience of working with the buyer of one of my investment properties.

Let’s call her Jan: a single woman in her early thirties who was going through a lot of life changes at the time we met. After selling her beautiful home to move on to a new life, a few things happened that drastically changed her plans. One major plan was to find another home to live in. She had temporarily moved in with her parents after these unfortunate incidents occurred, but we all know how difficult that would be after being on our own for a while.

So with the market for foreclosures growing in the area where she wanted to live, the family went seeking a good bank-owned foreclosure deal. My, how did their eyes open and frustration grow with this process. Many of us know the difficulty of shopping for a big ticket item like a car, selecting a college, engagement ring, a house to rent or own, etc. According to Jan, finding a deal on a bank-owned foreclosure home was definitely not as easy as she expected it to be, even with the large number of foreclosures around today.

She and her family were dragged around by real estate agents from one junky house to the next. Many of the houses were good prices, but they could barely get through the front door without encountering the smell of animals or the presence of major mold. The damage found at the houses they saw ranged from significant to major: kitchens were old and in many cases, nasty; the cabinets were worn out, falling apart, and greasy to the point that not even a professional cleaning would make a difference; appliances were old and beat up, or not working at all.

All the “great foreclosure deals” they saw seemed to get worse and worse: bathrooms were falling apart; heating systems weren’t maintained; windows were broken, old or damaged; light fixtures were broken or missing; mold was rampant. Each time, they heard the usual story from the real estate agents: “It will only take a few thousand dollars to fix the place up.

Check back this Friday for Part 2 of Jan’s buying a foreclosure story.

Tags: buying a foreclosure, buying a home, buying foreclosures, case study, homebuyers, moving, real estate, Renovations, searching for a house

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.