""It can be dangerous and it's definitely exciting," said McIlvaine, who had served as a sergeant in U.S. Air Force and started his retail career in security. "Your adrenaline is flowing as you are checking the house. You don't know what to expect."
Once the home is vacated and the locks are changed, McIlvaine can spend thousands of dollars cleaning it up. He leaves it to the sheriff to dispose of what's deemed the homeowner's personal property, while hiring contractors to haul out the trash. He never ever opens the refrigerator, a lesson he learned the hard way after looking in a freezer filled with rotten fish."
Supply for them exceeds demand. That would depress the price of flawless diamonds.
Here's an anecdote for you: in Nagoya, you can pay $700 a month for a one-room apartment. Not an awesomely located fully-furnished palatial one room apartment, just your generic twenty-something sleeping quarters which is about the size of many Americans' closet.
In my town, I pay $450 a month for a three-room apartment. It was so clean when I moved in that I suspected they had put artificial sparkle on the walls.
The whole of the reason it is cheap and Nagoya is not is that my town, sort of like Detroit, has some systemic economic issues which discourage young people from living there. Accordingly, after graduation they move to Nagoya to work, pushing the price of real estate there even higher and making landlords in my town even more desperate to offload inventory.
Without getting into a "mine is bigger than yours" game - I'd just like to note that I have a 600 square foot bachelor-suite (no bedroom), in a very, very old apartment building overlooking (complete with sound) the 101 freeway in a low income (and un-walkable) neighborhood of Redwood City and pay $1210/month + $65 water/sewer/garbage.
On the flip side, I used to fly out to Detroit and was interested in some of these $10,000 houses, but we could never work up the nerve to actually go into the neighborhoods out near 8 mile that had them, and I can't imagine living there.
Has anyone on HN been out to Detroit recently? There are many parts of that city that are like a war zone in terms of building/lot damage, and others that I would not go without armed escort. I guess this is just another way of saying the "absolute value" of property is pretty low in Detroit as well.
It's kind of like the "Anti-Paul-Graham-Geographic-Recipe-for-a-successful-startup-community" type of environment.
I was in downtown Detroit on Saturday night, and I felt safe and had a good time, though I was near the "reinvigorated neighborhood around Wayne State" referenced in the article. There are lots of cool places in downtown Detroit. Good restaurants, art, theater, music, it's all there. In the summer there are some great outdoor music festivals.
But one of the interesting things about Detroit is that you're never far from urban decay. Even nice houses, or the revitalized part of Woodward, is at most 2 or 3 blocks from abandoned buildings and boarded-up houses.
No argument, but my statement was shorthand for "supply exceeds demand for good reason", since "supply exceeds demand" is usually the same as "prices are low".
Now, it could be that there's just too few people in Detroit for the property, but from other stories, it would appear that these low cost houses may come without wiring or piping, that having been stolen to sell as scrap or the like, and other forms of vandalism seem likely, too. I'm not saying that there aren't some that are worth it; I'm considering buying a house or two at these prices, myself. :)
I think the bigger issue is crime. No price is a good deal if you get shot. And you can't rent out a house for any decent amount if the tenants could just buy the house next door for $7500 (and then get shot for it).
I've heard similar things happened in East Boston during the '91 real estate bust. It had been a recently gentrifying area, but when the economy fell, the yuppies moved out, property values fell, and the crime moved in. That made house prices fall farther, so that by the end of the bust, condos that had been selling for $200k were going for $40k.
