Before we get into any specifics, a few thoughts on how this will hopefully work, and some thoughts on why we are doing this.
Like many others, we've been duped into the idea of buying a house, even though we live in New York City where renters outnumber owners 2 to 1 -- and that's only if you include co-ops and condos. Here in the northwest bronx, the percentage of homeowners is microscopic, yet our parents still instilled in us the notion that owning is better than buying, and we are trying to conform to their ideals.
If we were anywhere outside of NYC we'd have a huge supply of homes to choose from right now (not that we could afford all of them). But here in the northwest bronx, the pickin's are mighty slim, and many of them are just plain-and-simple bad deals. A bunch of them are overpriced. Others need a lot of money up front to make them liveable. Still more will drain you in the long run trying to maintain them at the barely liveable level they are at now. The real winners give you all three headstarts on the road to foreclosure.
So one of the goals with this blog is to give buyers a tool they can use to help them not get into a bad deal that will lead to foreclosure. Consider this site the antithesis of the "how to make money in real estate" seminars that teach decent people how to become detestable property-flippers. Instead of getting rich, hopefully we can help some people not become poor quickly in that horrible equity-draining/credit-ruining/relationship-stressing process known as foreclosure.
As the sidebar notes, one side-effect of this site will be (hopefully) to keep the local real estate market in check. Prices are out of line mostly due to a pool of demand that is falsely inflated. In the push to make homeownership available to (nearly) all of us, there are plenty of families that have been steered into homes they can't afford. Whether it's through predatory lending, or convincing a 3-family home buyer they can have 100% collections (at $3,000/month) with little expenses on their 2 rental units, many families have bought homes at prices they never should have been able to even think about. The benefit has been almost entirely to the real estate industry (brokers, lenders, flippers, etc.) while many buyers have ended up in foreclosure and many sellers have gotten ripped off by one of those "cash for your house" developers. The increased pool of demand has allowed many to make a lot of cash in recent years when profits should have been more modest had they used traditional underwriting.
So if you are looking for a home in the Bronx, especially the northwest Bronx, check back here regularly to see what's going on in the local private home real estate market. If you have a question about a specific house that's for sale, post a comment and we'll see what we can dig up for you.
