Posing as homeowners or city officials, a team of 15 criminals fraudulently sold 82 unoccupied houses to unsuspecting buyers over the last five years, a grand jury charged Wednesday.There is the usual lesson in this story...if it's too good to be true, it usually is. Buyers believing that they could easily and without city red tape buy abandoned homes from next to nothing, discovered that they had been had. Shame on them.The homes were in poor neighborhoods and were sold for as little as $6,000, often to immigrants and non-English speakers, and often for cash, according to the grand jury report. Proceeds from the scheme could be as much as several million dollars, the authorities said.
“Both sides of these cases have suffered immeasurably,” District Attorney Lynne Abraham said in a statement, “the families who paid cash for ‘buying’ what they never owned and spending more money for rehabilitation of the properties, and the rightful homeowners who had to hire attorneys to get their rightful property returned to them.”...
One of the suspects, Troy Baylor, took prospective buyers on tours of the empty properties, telling them they were owned by the city, which was seeking to sell them, and that he, as a city employee, could have the houses’ titles transferred to the buyers, according to the report.
Buyers were given documents that purported to give them the right to enter the properties, which in some cases they began to renovate, the report said. Most never received deeds.
Mr. Baylor told one buyer, Guillermo Adames, to look for abandoned properties, and to let him know if there was one he liked, the report said. Mr. Adames paid Mr. Baylor $6,000 for a house that had been bought in 1982 for $27,000.
Ms. Abraham said Philadelphia was vulnerable to such schemes because its declining population had left it with more houses than people to occupy them, creating a growing number of vacant properties.
But also shame on the absentee owners. Those people who buy investment property in the city, and then when it doesn't work out, just board up the house and leave it. The city is lax on collecting taxes or contacting owners of these abandoned properties, so houses like these can sit for decades....becoming eyesores, flop houses, bringing down the rest of the neighborhood, and becoming material for a scam.
Also shame on the city for not being more proactive. There is no reason why a home should be abandoned and vacant for decades. If taxes aren't being paid, the home isn't being upkept, and isn't being actively marketed for sale, the city should seize it to resell for back taxes, level it to make way for open spaces or development, or rehab it for someone to live in.
There are whole blocks of empty boarded up homes in the city, creating dangerous enviroments and adding no value to the city's bottom line. So...Mayor Nutter the alleged reformer, what are you going to do about it?
