15 Houses on Land Contract!!!

[Thomas Fish]

I currently have 15 houses for sale on land contract. Here are the packages:

7 Houses in Detroit: $250 per house, 0% interest, 48 months, $1000 down. Two of these houses are duplexes.

3 Houses in Saginaw, Michigan: $400 per month per house, 0% interest, 48 months, $1000 down. One house is a duplex.

4 Houses in Saginaw, Michigan: $75 per house until January, then $200 per house for the next 48 months. 0% interest $1000 down.

These houses need to be fixed up and rented or resold. Rents in the areas average $500 per month.

If interested, just let me know.

Thanks!

[Don Konipol]

You're not missing anything, Jimmy. Bulk packages of Detroit houses are going for $3-5,000 per house.

The houses are not rentable at a profit. Even if you can find a tenant who pays, the monthly repairs are greater than the rent payments. If repairs are not made, tenants have a legitamate reason to withhold rent. So these houses are money losers on a monthly basis even when fully rented and even when there are no mortgage payments!

Fire protection and police protection in some areas of Detroit are almost non existent. Detroit infrastructure was built out for 2.5 million inhabitants, current population is well below 1 million. Taxes won't support anything close to the neccessary services.

So the game with Detroit property is one of speculation. Hope that you are buying so low that when and if things get better you will have a large enough capital gain to offset holding costs (taxes, security, repairs, depreciation, vandalism, utilities ) even if house is not rented.

But will that appreciation occur? Intuitively, $5000 per house is so low we believe it must come up in price. But consider this: Detroit mayor Dave Bing (yes, the basketball player) advises razing half of all Detroit property, and selling it as farmland. Although this crazed scheme will never come to fruition, it shows the lack of faith that Detroit can ever recover.

The truth is why would anyone move to Detroit unless they had no choice. There are few jobs, little social services, little in the way of high end entertainment or retail. All demagraphics, technilogical advances, social forces, etc., are working against it.

Detroit could be the first major city to become a ghost town. If it does (I am not predicting it will) $5000 per house will be way to much to have paid.