Here’s some money; Don’t trash the place
Several years ago, I spent the day with a Chicago real estate agent who specialized in selling properties that had fallen into the foreclosure process. It was a pretty depressing day.
I toured four or five houses with this agent. We’d open a bedroom door and find dolls, action figures and a pair of shoes lying on the floor, items left behind as a family moved out. In other houses we saw holes punched in thin drywall. We saw missing doors, probably taken by the families who once lived there. In one house, the faucets from all the sinks had been removed.
This happens at times: When owners learn they are losing their house to foreclosure, they get mad. They take it out on the house because there’s no one else they can go after. So you find holes in walls, torn carpet, cigarette burns in countertops.
A story at RealEstateJournal.com by writer Michael Phillips takes a look at one way banks and brokerages are trying to stop this: They’re offering homeowners money, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to refrain from trashing their foreclosed homes before they are forced out. You can read the story here.
This has become such a common part of the real estate business, there’s even a term for it: “Cash for keys.”
With the number of foreclosures across the country still high, you can bet we’ll be seeing a lot more of these payoffs in the future.
Tags: cash for keys, foreclosure, RealEstateJournal.comRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Buying a Property, Educational Tools, Foreclosed Properties, Insights and Commentaries, Mortgage, Real Estate Tools, Real Life Stories, Rights and Laws, Selling a Property
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