WHOOPIE-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Hip Hip HOORAH!!!!!!!!  

In the words of DV, "Viva la renaissance"


The median sales price this past month compared to a year ago -- Nov '11 was $105,000.  Nov '12 HUGE TANK down to $88,000.

And year-to-date!!!!!!!!!!     Drum roll please.   Shake those pom poms.....

It has gone down from the YTD last year.   Actually tanked to LESS THAN $100,000 !!!!!!!!!!!

But downtown is doing such good for the ctiy.   Then EXPLAIN why sale prices all over the place are increasing but in the city of Schenectady, thanks to the ex BS mayor, the savage woman, death Ray, King Philip aka Fat Morris, the sale prices are GOING DOWN!!!!!!!!!  

Oh where oh where is the downtown DEM cheerleader?    Truth hurts, too embarrassed to comment on the issues that contradict all the cheerleading.



  

Didn't you hear? Mayor McCheese finally sold his foreclosed first house! Release the lead balloon's. Only 699 left in foreclosure including several churches.
     Another DEM moron program that will pay for itself -ROTFLMAO!

The city really needs to keep out of the real estate business. I understand what he's trying to pull off, partially, but it just won't work. Really. I live here, if these were good ideas I wouldn't be against them, I would be pulling for them.
An awful lot of new listings here in the Upper Union area. I think that people might be afraid that there is no end to the willingness of the city to raise taxes no matter how bad it gets. Nobody has any confidence in that home buying program as a cure. I also think that Jason Cuthbert getting fired had something to do with it. He went, it was publicized, for sale signs went up.
The new, improved school board didn't help much as people started to find out what the guy they hired to fix our schools is like.

It's working as good as all DEM moron plans. They laugh all the way to the bank while you cough it up. But don't fret. Mayor McCheese can soon "work together" with new Assemblyman A-Jello. Maybe he can do to the State what he did
to Schenectady County? The schools have all been fixed with SCORE and the new Super-lol. The Mad Bomber was the only bad apple and no one else knew from nuthin.

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
Flipping blight
City’s seizure/rehab venture shows promise: contractors buying into housing potential
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

An unlikely and ambitious plan for Schenectady’s blight is actually getting results. A contractor has purchased an overgrown, trash-fi lled house near Union Street.
    A tenant, who once put up with an absentee landlord who didn’t make repairs and didn’t pay the taxes, is now buying his former apartment.
    And many other contractors are eagerly awaiting the rehab specs for about 20 houses throughout the city, which they plan to bid on so they can bring the buildings up to code and fl ip them for a profi t.
    Mayor Gary McCarthy started the project with a simple idea: Seize houses from those who wouldn’t pay taxes for years on end, sell them to responsible homeowners and use the money to balance the city budget and pay for the demolition of the worst buildings.
    But many of the houses had not been maintained for years, and Building Inspector Eric Shilling said they needed thousands of dollars of work simply to bring them up to code. Realtors said the typical home buyer wouldn’t take a risk on such houses. So Shilling and McCarthy hatched an idea that seemed so outlandish that
even the state Comptroller’s Offi ce said the city shouldn’t rely on it. They decided to ask contractors to take all the risk: Do the work on each house but only get paid when the house sold.
    Critics said no one would take that deal. But contractors are lining up.
    Legere Restoration is examining every house the city seized and giving the city estimates on the cost of repairs, so that the city can judge the work involved in each case.
    Other contractors are bidding on the projects, with their bids judged against the initial estimate. But Legere is so eager to get the work that the company has offered to take on every project in which the bids come in higher than Legere’s estimates.
    By March, Shilling plans to have contractors at work on 12 houses in the Northside neighborhood. He said he thinks it’s realistic to expect 20 houses to be at some stage of the rehab process by July. Contractors are telling him they could go even faster if he can write more specs.
    “They would like to see as much inventory as possible,” Shilling said.
BIG PLANS
Contractor Gary Pappas, who has already started work at the fi rst house offered through the program, is hoping to do 10 to 12 more houses next year. He thinks the city’s plan is fantastic, even though contractors don’t get paid until the house sells.
    Contractors regularly work under those conditions, he said, and usually have to find buyers themselves. To work with a city Realtor and to have city officials helping to promote the houses is huge.
    “It’s not guaranteed success, but it’s the best possible scenario. This program is as close as you can get,” he added. “Will I make some mistakes? Probably. But it’s all doing the homework on the front end.”
    In other words, he is carefully inspecting each house before making a bid. He wants to be sure he knows what he’s getting into — and that the house is in an area where it will sell. That may prove to be a problem at some point, because the city has foreclosed upon many houses in Hamilton Hill, where houses don’t sell often and don’t sell for much money.
    For now, the majority of the houses offered to contractors are in the Northside neighborhood, Shilling said. Others are scattered throughout the city.
    Pappas, who grew up in Rotterdam, said contractors warned him to tread carefully in Schenectady. But the newly reorganized building department is working smoothly and swiftly. He said he decided to bid on more than just one house when he saw that city employees were more than willing to work with him.
    They’re even willing to let him tear holes in the foreclosed houses before signing any bids.
    “What really helped me was Eric’s program allows you to go in, kick the tires,” he said. “You can do any and all research. Say you want to know how much of the building is structurally sound? You don’t have to guess if the foundation is good or bad. You can open the wall and peer in.”
    He did that at one building, after carefully asking permission.
    “Eric was like, ‘Have at it! Let’s take a look together!’ ” Pappas said.
    The program isn’t perfect, but city workers met with the contractors to outline the plan and ask them for input. Since then, he said, they’ve been willing to make changes when problems crop up.
    “It really does come down to being flexible,” he said. “You’ve got the right team, seriously, that’s willing to make these tweaks and tunes.”
    Critics have also suggested that the foreclosed houses are in such bad condition that they would not be worth repairing. But contractors have indicated otherwise as they begin to bid on the work.
    Pappas said many of the buildings that look awful on the outside have “good bones.”
“There’s a ton of potential,” he said.
DERELICTS ABOUND
    And more are on the way.
    Corporation Counsel John Polster, who seized 160 houses this summer, took 15 more in December. All of those were vacant, he said. He is now planning to take small groups of houses regularly, rather than hundreds at once.
    “I was running city employees ragged with the last group I took,” he said. “With every house we have to inspect, board them up if needed.”
    While the majority of the tax delinquent structures in Schenectady are apartment buildings, there is a sizeable group of owner-occupied homes that are years behind on taxes.
    So far, he said, he hasn’t seized those. The owners were given until mid-December to pay off their taxes, but only a few were able to do so, Polster said. Still, he hasn’t foreclosed.
    “I just haven’t gone after them yet,” Polster said, noting that the exemption period offered by the City Council only expired a week ago.
    McCarthy is hoping the process will convince owners — particularly landlords — that they must pay their taxes. He’s also hoping that the house sales will bring in new, more responsible owners who are willing and able to pay their taxes.
    None of this is easy, as city officials have learned to their frustration. After foreclosing on the blighted, tax-delinquent houses, Shilling had to inspect every one of them. City officials wrote rental agreements for tenants whose landlords had lost their buildings and took the landlords to court, pro bono, to get the tenants’ security deposits back.
    Some tenants were living in unsafe, distressing conditions and had to be evicted. Some vacant buildings were in such bad shape that Shilling decided they couldn’t be profi tably repaired. Those buildings are on the demolition list, and three buildings have already been razed.
    But Shilling found that most of the houses could be repaired for less than their typical sale price in their neighborhood.
    “None of it looks good from the outside,” he said. “But many of them are worthy on the inside.”
    Those “worthy” houses need thousands of dollars in repairs to bring them up to code — from new roofs and working furnaces to safe wiring. ..........................>>>>.....................>>>>..........................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00101&AppName=1

Quoted from Madam X

The city really needs to keep out of the real estate business. I understand what he's trying to pull off, partially, but it just won't work. Really. I live here, if these were good ideas I wouldn't be against them, I would be pulling for them.
An awful lot of new listings here in the Upper Union area. I think that people might be afraid that there is no end to the willingness of the city to raise taxes no matter how bad it gets. Nobody has any confidence in that home buying program as a cure. I also think that Jason Cuthbert getting fired had something to do with it. He went, it was publicized, for sale signs went up.
The new, improved school board didn't help much as people started to find out what the guy they hired to fix our schools is like.

Since they closed Howe on Baker K-6 For Sale signs are all over. 2 Foreclosures back to back on Garner. What is worse-the condition of the streets or the roofs? A quick drive around Upper Union reveals the
implosion. When DEM taxes are so high no one has money for home improvement which only invites the assessor. Nobody gots time for this. The City is literally collapsing. Landlords are dumping properties on a
horrible resale market. McCheese is a one term disaster. The DEMS will dump him in a primary if he has nerve enough to run again.

20 houses!   Just a paltry, mere 20 houses?    Out of what we know were 600 foreclosed.   And what about the other vacant and/or abandoned?

Hardly worth cheering for.

Perhaps the contractors are as dumb as the mayor.

If a contractor wants to do the cheap way, like bargain outlet  stuff, and can do something for $10,000, maybe $20,000 and sell the house for $40,000, that's a little profit.  

But contractors are NOT going to do high quality work with good materials; they aren't going to spend $60,000 just to sell a house for $70,000.

There are tons of houses in very good condition, often modernized, in nice neighborhoods, going for way way below the city's alleged market value, they sit for sale for a year and NO ONE WANTS TO BUY THEM.   If people don't want to buy the good house at low prices in good neighborhoods, it's common sense to know that few are going to buy the flipped houses.

they'll burn the rest down for parking areas.....

Do the flippers pay realestate taxes during the rehab and while for sale?  Anyone know?

Quoted from TakingItBack

Do the flippers pay realestate taxes during the rehab and while for sale?  Anyone know?

I would think they would have to pay.   However, I'm sure that the dems drastically reduced the assessments on the houses so that the tax bills would about to only a few hundred dollars, ya know.

It would also be interesting to learn whether that sham scammer Focus Construction is getting jobs

Is the city thoroughly investigating all contractors, i.e., checking the names behind the probably many new LLC's that will have been created just after McC announced this soon-to-be-proven-a-failure.    Just because many of the infamous scumlords portray themselves as contractors too.   And all such work I would think will be proven---to the taxpayers--to have been done by licensed plumbers and electricians (not sure if the city requires general construction to be licensed), and that they would check the AG office and the BBB for complaints.

Probably not, the city wouldn't spend the money and staff time to investigate that stuff because they are focused on their rich buddies downtown

This certainly isn't the market for house flipping, going to lose their shirts. I don't know any contractors who would be willing to front their own cash, if they had any. Days of speculation are long gone. Maybe the next house the city should knock down is the burned  hulk sitting next to CP middle school, you know the one with the gaping hole in the roof, tattered tarp waving in the gentle breezes. I thought there was some kind of time limit involved with these places, like sh%t or get off the pot. Paperwork is probably sitting in the same drawer as the parking tickets and arrest warrants.

Quoted from mikechristine1

It would also be interesting to learn whether that sham scammer Focus Construction is getting jobs

Is the city thoroughly investigating all contractors, i.e., checking the names behind the probably many new LLC's that will have been created just after McC announced this soon-to-be-proven-a-failure.    Just because many of the infamous scumlords portray themselves as contractors too.   And all such work I would think will be proven---to the taxpayers--to have been done by licensed plumbers and electricians (not sure if the city requires general construction to be licensed), and that they would check the AG office and the BBB for complaints.

Probably not, the city wouldn't spend the money and staff time to investigate that stuff because they are focused on their rich buddies downtown

they don't check....they don't have to ......it's a wink and a nod.....

the NOD-BOOBS.....

Quoted from Dirt2

This certainly isn't the market for house flipping, going to lose their shirts. I don't know any contractors who would be willing to front their own cash, if they had any. ...

How can a contractor make money when he has to line the walls with Kevlar.

Let's see how quickly more for sale signs go up in the Stanford St area.

And after a couple years of praising the dems in the city, DV STILL REFUSES to buy, won't even rent IN the city.