Buying a Foreclosure – An Interesting Story
In March, my husband and I purchased our first home. We live in Arlington, VA across the river from Washington, DC which means that real estate is pretty expensive in our area. As a result, almost all the homes in our price range were foreclosures or short sales.
The nicest place that we could afford was a two bedroom, two bath condo is a three year old building. It had an underground parking spot, fancy kitchen, a balcony and was next to the Metro bus stop. Pretty much everything we were looking for in a home.
So what was the problem? The previous owner had been foreclosed on and in retaliation he stripped the condo bare. He took everything and I mean everything. The kitchen was missing every appliance – fridge, stove, dishwasher, microwave, washer and dryer. He even took the four-prong outlet for the dryer out of the wall – couldn’t tell you why.
Now taking the appliances isn’t all that unusual. He also took all the doors out of the condo – closet doors, bedroom doors and bathroom doors. Most of the light fixtures also went with him. Next he took everything in the master bath – shower head, medicine cabinet, large mirror over the vanity and my personal favorite – the toilet. Why in the world would you take the toilet with you? You can get a new one at Home Depot for a little over $100 and the toilets in the condo weren’t anything special.
Lastly, he took around 25 knobs off the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. Now this shows an impressive attention to detail. The time it would take to unscrew all those little knobs that would be so easy to replace. I thought it really made a statement.
This is the condo we ended up buying. Since there were so many things missing from the apartment, it had been on the market for months and the price had been lowered three times putting the condo squarely in our price range. Why Fannie Mae, the bank that now owned the condo, couldn’t be bothered to fix everything, I’ll never know.
But I’m grateful, we have an almost new condo and since we had to replace most items inside, we also have a chance to fix things up exactly the way we like! So in a way I should probably be thanking the previous owner – otherwise a place like this would have been too much money and already snapped up!
Do you have an entertaining foreclosure stories? If so, please share in the comments.