Whenever I used to berate myself for taking so long to finish my moved houses Stephanie would always tell me to take a drive up Willamette Street. That’s where this house sits, still unfinished after being moved there 20 years ago. It did finally get lowered down on a foundation about 15 years ago, after sitting on two steel beams and cribbing for the first five years. It’s a mystery to me why someone would let this go unfinished for so long, given all the rent they’ve foregone. Conservatively, they’ve missed out on some $300,000 in net income. They could have paid someone to put it back together for maybe a quarter of that back in 1998. Oh well.
And the sign on the porch is deliciously ironic.
No Build indeed. That sign was part of an opposition campaign against the Bus Rapid Transit system (EMX) that was built several years back. That’s another story, as the money to build it came from Washington, not local tax dollars. Made about as much sense to protest that as it did to let this house sit here unfinished for 20 years.
Actually, I see that the electric service has been connected, and there’s a gas meter. And there’s a drain line for the gutters. I’d say those all happened in the past 5-7 years or so. At this rate, it will get done; say maybe another 10-15 years.
No, nobody’s living in there; I checked. The interior needs a complete renovation, but these little bungalows are pretty easy to whip back in shape, as Jim Klein knows. A couple of guys could whip it out in 2-3 months, and start collecting rent, as in at least $1600-$1750 a month. Makes a landlord like me shake my head. Time is money.
I can’t believe the gov’t isn’t breathing down the owner’s neck, or at least was when it was sitting on the cribbing for so long.
My thoughts exactly. Wouldn’t happen in my neck-o-the-woods.
I don’t know why, but stuff like this seems to be a Pacific-northwest type of thing. Looks like someone cares enough to take care of the yard, which is more than I can say about some places I’ve seen.
Any bright ideas on how to move the likes of this to Vancouver, BC?
I think you’ll need a bigger truck.
I think you meant bungle-low. 🙂
Oddly enough, I’m familiar with another property that has sat vacant and undeveloped for fifteen years-
When we moved into our town home complex in 2003, an adjacent unit sat vacant. Over time, we learned the owners had stripped the interior down to the studs, and installed some wood framed windows in violation of the home owners association covenants (the association wanted to maintain a consistent appearance from unit to unit).
At that point the property owners went into to full stop mode, and when we moved out in 2017, the property still stood vacant with an unfinished interior. The owners did store a few things in the garage, so perhaps they carried the property as warehouse space. Assuming the garage has about 450 square feet, their warehouse acquisition cost would have been about $1,450 a square foot.
The attached street view shows the property with the offending window highlighted.
Las Vegas has a hugely weird real estate market. Properties appreciate quickly (and bust quickly when the mood changes) but rents haven’t kept up, nor can they.
Investors, in many cases, don’t even bother to find tenants. They consider it an unnecessary hassle.
There’s a condo across the way from the one I live in. It was purchased in August 2018 by an accountant from LA, fro $220k. He’s probably never seen it, and it isn’t for rent. The way things are going, he’ll probably sell it in a year for $280k.
Really screws up the market for people who actually want to LIVE in homes/condos.
That sort of thing happened in my neighborhood too, a college town near the University of Maryland, when I first started looking into buying here circa 2007. The housing bubble was in full swing; small, 1950s houses that sold for $100K eight years earlier were now routinely fetching $450,000. I knew the bubble was about to burst when one rather dilapidated house received seven bids within its first week on the market, some above the asking price. The listing agent informed me that all seven of them were investors looking to buy and “flip” the house, perhaps after fixing it up superficially. Not a single one of them wanted to live there or even rent it out.
A year later, the Great Recession hit and prices slid to half their level from two years earlier, burning many of these “investors”. Some of them refused to acknowledge reality and still wouldn’t sell their houses much below what they paid for them. Some of these stood vacant for a very long time.
This is a huge issue as the disparity between rich and poor gets greater in the cosmopolitan centers of London, New York, Miami, and Istanbul — urban real estate in desired cities is a great place to park money. Consequently, high rises are built as “wealth storage units” inflating real estate cost and arguably displacing others who would actually live there 24/7, impeding the provision of life and vitality to the streets.
Had to run out and was reminded of a similar situation a couple of miles from me. When we moved out here there was a very dilapidated single wide for sale where the value was obviously in the land. It did sell and it didn’t take long until the mobile was removed and a foundation poured. That occurred just in time for the housing crisis so it just sat there for many years. Eventually they started framing and they pretty quickly got the shell built but things then came to an abrupt stop. A couple of years later progress started happening again. Steps were built so you could get in w/o a ladder or climbing and they started doing drywall and you would frequently see people there, front door open stand lights on ect. Then again no activity for the last 2 years or so. Last time I was by and they had the double front doors open I could see that the drywall was finished but not painted and I could see a bit of a kitchen w/ cabinets installed.
I did look up the owner and they live about a 1/2 a mile away, or at least that is the mailing address and the mailing address comes up with the same owners.
When we moved to this part of the state 27 years ago, someone was adding a second storey to a local farmhouse a couple of hundred yards off the main highway. All looked to be going well, then there was a nationally-publicized collapse of a large local building society in which thousands lost money, and the property has just sat since then – second-storey windows gaping to the elements. Over the years there have been a few more cars and old trucks abandoned in the yard, but no progress on the house. Guess it’s far back enough from the road that the council’s okay with that.
The Gizan pyramid may be a monument to the gods, but this is a geezer’s monument to Pyramid.
The 2008 crash halted several ambitious flips in this neighborhood. One was completed but unsold for 10 years because it was too ambitious and too architecty. It finally sold in last year’s brief boom. Another was a McMansion tacked onto a tiny two-room cottage. It sat open to wind and snow for 10 years, and finally got revised and de-McMansioned and sold last year. A third was more like the one you’ve described… steady but remarkably slow work. Slight improvement noticed every few months. It appears to be complete now, but the owners are still living next to it in a RV.
We have a bank owned property in our neighborhood with squatters who are to be quite honest about are dicks. Sheriff is finally on their cases but it takes time I guess. You must live in a better neighborhood than I as some crack heads would move in and probably set it on fire otherwise.
We have an unoccupied house in our neighborhood. It’s been empty the whole time we’ve lived here, at least 20 years. Vines were growing across the garage door and raccoons had just moved into the attic when the roof got redone and the yard cleaned up. That was 5 years ago, it’s still empty.
It’s probably an $800k property, could have been rented for at least $2k per month. $480k isn’t chump change..
But I guess the time goes by one day at a time, and that doesn’t feel so urgent.
I live out in the middle of nowhere (google “Erin Prarie, Wisconsin” and you’ll see) Anyway there is a farm property that was being cleaned up, it looks like they scraped everything movable up and pushed it up to the road) including a house up on the big moving beams. I’ve been here 8 years, and the house never moved (and everything was so overgrown with plants it was put there long before I got here) We had a HUGE windstorm this spring that knocked the house over, and they finally cleaned up the wreckage. Along with a couple outbuildings, a good dozen old trucks, two giant old AC tractors, and whatever detritus was in the weeds. I drive past it every day, and now it looks like all the other bare farm fields around here.
I’m guessing it’s an out of town owner that VERY occasionally get the time or urge to move forward with it, has little invested in it, very low carrying costs, and plenty of other money and/or projects/life to deal with. It’s very easy for everything else to get in the way when you’re not right there, ask me how I know. I’m way behind in my own total rehab project in Laramie but pretty on time with my local stuff.
But Paul is correct, a motivated person with one helper could get this done in under three months and start collecting rent almost no matter what it needs. Paul and I could do it in less than two months but I’m not confident how comfy his couch is :-). Although that could be a powerful motivator in itself…
A family we were friends with lived in a house that used to be on the river, but was moved to it’s present location sometime around 1947. It was put on top of the foundation of a house that burned down a couple of years earlier. Both the foundation and the house were huge, but the house didn’t fit well at all on the foundation, there were sections of it that were exposed and they made caps out of concrete and they had a tendency to leak every few years. The house had the old pushbutton switches and had cloth wiring. Over the years, there was a family room added to the back, the wiring and switches were updated. The insanely long and narrow kitchen was never enlarged, the tiny dining room wasn’t touched at all, it had nice wood cabinets, and the huge living room was redone after a tree fell and punched a hole it in it during a storm that lasted all weekend, while no one was home. Over the years, one of the kids was in a bad car accident and ended up in a wheelchair for the last 42 years he was alive, and there were ramps added. That kid became a contractor, but the house was never really “done”, it just was patched up and the bathrooms were updated about every 10 years. He was supposed to get an elevator put in so he could access the 2nd and third floor, but it was never done. They did actually get the pad put in for the bottom of the elevator tube (It was going on the outside), but that’s as far as it got. He died 6 years ago after a series of injuries and illnesses at 60, and only his 90+ year old mother lives there with his last dog, a huge Rottweiler, and the house is still “undone”. When she goes, the house will get auctioned off, and I wonder if I will see it finally get “finished” or torn down and something new put up. It needs a lot of work to just get to the point there is nothing left to do on it.
Oh, but Mr N, there are other ways in which time and inaction can indeed be money.
To the detriment of social cohesion and housing affordability, Chinese citizens own many, many houses in Oz capital cities, and the places are treated as no more than a bank.
The purchase price most commonly comes from untaxed (under-the-table) earnings in China, there are essentially no limits on foreigners buying Aus property (unlike any other country), and the owners do not want the hassle and wear and tear of tenants. They do not need the tenant income, nor can any of the cost deductions be used. Thus the houses sit, totally unoccupied, possibly for 20 years. It is a form of safe bank account in a stable democracy outside of China, the “interest” being the inevitable capital accumulation. It is money that cannot be seized by officials in China. It is also, potentially, a safe haven and money source should the need to flee from China arise.
Note that I am not critical of the individuals doing this. For them, it is utterly rational, and it is entirely legal (putting aside the cash source, which is not morally straightforward issue either, but a complex issue of corruption in a communist state).
This happens from small outer-burb new houses to $20 million dollar mansions in the inner ones.
To see houses in varying condition simply sit unoccupied for years on end is a sadly common sight in a my city (Melbourne), while housing prices are amongst the most expensive in the world and many are now locked out of the market for good.
Maybe it’s time to look up the owner in town records and contact them about selling the house as is. When I bought the lot my new house now sits on, there were for sale by owner signs on the lot, but no one ever answered the phone. One letter to the owner and they called me in two days. We wrapped up the deal in two weeks. When you look at how much they were paying in property taxes over the 10 years they had the lot, which they bought at the peak of the market before the 2008 crash, and how much less they sold the lot for when I bought it, you have to scratch your head.
Ever since the shoddily built and maintained flood control levies of the U. S. Core of Engineers allowed Hurricane Katrina flood waters to soak most of New Orleans on August 30, 2005, homes similar to this one have become a common occurrence in some of the more economically disadvantaged areas of #NOLA.
No/insufficient insurance coverage, rapidly rising material & labor costs and shady, disappearing “contractors” have left their mark on the Big Easy.
One of my earliest memories from childhood was the house my parents bought in town (Findlay, OH) sometime in 1960 or 1961. It was going to be torn down to expand a parking lot.
My parents had a basement built, and the house was moved (with its 2nd storey torn down) about 10 miles from town to their farm.
The outside got finished, the upstairs inside never did. We moved in 1969, and the new owners tore down the house.
Almost 50 years later, I occasionally drive by where it was located, but it looks NOTHING like it did when I was a kid.
As alluded to above, the house appears to have full electric and sewer facilities. Therefore, the town may not be worried as long as its collecting property taxes and there are no apparent property hazards for the neighbors to complain about.
There could also be a dispute between surviving family members on who has clear title. I have seen several houses fall into disrepair due to inheritance catfights. I’ve also seen where the surviving family members will pass on a property because it cost too much to make it compliant.