Remember how BoingBoing had that post a little while back about how the housing market in Detroit and Indianapolis had collapsed to the point where you could get a nice little house for a few thousand dollars?
Well, I had already been looking at the Indiana market when that post was posted, and after letting two possibles slip through my fingers, on Thursday I found the right one, in Richmond, Indiana. Here's the picture I got from Mr. Google:
It's brick, which is good for people like us who do irresponsible things like going to Europe for a summer (we lost a house to mold that way once, I kid you not -- Indiana summers are not to be trifled with). It was built in 1890, meaning it's survived a lot already. It has a new roof. It has the original built-in cabinetry, something I've always really liked in nineteenth-century small-town Indiana homes.
It's got four bedrooms, two full baths, and what the tax records describe as two formal dining rooms. A total of 12 finished rooms, about 2.5 times the space we're in now. Oh, and a 20x40-foot "storage shed" in back, built in 1920, something I'm assuming will turn out to be a barn.
The seller accepted my offer today.
$8000. Right. That's eight thousand dollars, for a perfectly good house with a new(ish) roof. My previous best bet (which I waffled too long to get) sold for $10,000, also a brick house of about that vintage. This one's better.
I'm currently enjoying the silver lining of this whole economy thing, but ... this is a little scary.
Update, 2009-03-10: oh dear Lord, I just thought to look at the aerial photography from Microsoft (Google street view didn't go down C Avenue to the house's south). It is a freaking battleship of a house. I really am going to heat it with steam and install a lightning tower.
Note the "storage shed" in the back. It's 20x40, has a garage door on the south, and appears to me to be a two-story barn. Good God almighty, what have I just bought?
Fascinating, the notion of buying a house with history attached.
The house was mentioned in Quaker Life's September, 2003 issue. "Renaissance House: A Ministry of Renovation". It is still linked to from richmondquakers.com, but the renaissancehouse.org domain is gone to the Bitbucket in the Sky, and no, the Wayback Machine only caches an older owner of the domain, not the 2005-2007-vintage site, which is a shame. Pictures would have been nice.
Update 2009-03-18: The alligator's name is Amos Moses, and the man himself is John Fitch, the director of Renaissance House and former owner of the edifice in question. It turns out he's a pretty nice guy (well, you expect that of Quakers) and the Renaissance House community is still going strong in two nearby houses with much lower payments.
So that's good.
Tomorrow, March 25, I'm closing on the house. The title company has the money, my sister has my power of attorney, and all is set; tomorrow I become a landowner again. But there's something I don't understand, now that I've seen the HUD document detailing the financing of this deal.
John Fitch bought this house to form the Renaissance House in 2003, financing $54,000. I very much doubt he'd paid more than he had to. So five years later, I can't imagine he owed less than $50,000 or so. Following me?
Of the $8000 changing hands tomorrow, $2500 goes to the realtor, $700 to a property management company (coincidentally also the realtor, but that's not the point), $500 to a listing placement company, etc. etc. The actual current holder of the mortgage will be getting a tad over $4000 for this magnificent structure.
So here's my question. Given that this is more than a 90% loss -- why? Why would they foreclose? Is this one of those "pennies on the dollar mortgage purchases" one reads about? Who benefits?
Because somebody thought this was a good idea. The realtor clearly thinks so, with reason. I think so, because I get a cheap house (actually, Renaissance House may end up getting the use of the building for a year or two; we'll see). But the original holder of the mortgage?
Somebody's really insane in all this. And it seems indicative of the whole economy.
So I also asked MetaFilter what they could add. And (as they do) they came up with a very large amount of food for thought and useful links.
Current ETA on-site for triage and cleaning is mid-May.
How cool is that?
Subject: Can anyone edit your blog?
I hope not. But just in case we can I'd just like to say (and I speak for all of humanity here) that you should let us people on the internet come and live in y our carriage house whenever we feel like it. We wouldn't pay you per se. But thi nk of it as wiki-living.
thank you, -tom
Tom, I can't tell you how horrifying an idea I find that, but the sad fact of the matter is that my family and I are living in the carriage house at the moment, before getting underway renovating the big house.
However, finding tom's post in the spam filter (sorry, tom, nothing personal) reminds me that I kind of left my home-grown blog high and dry in favor of the shiny new House-specific Blogspot blog I started shortly after arrival here in town. Check it out; lots of status updates and pictures.
