Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Think twice before taking that sink!



A local Damascas man was arrested after stripping his house after losing it to foreclosure (Oregonian). The photo above shows what it looked like before he stripped it. See below for the after shot.

DAMASCUS -- After stripping his foreclosed home of everything from the air conditioning system to the kitchen sink, Grigoriy Bogoslavets was convicted of a crime that is often witnessed but rarely reported.

The 33-year-old electrician pleaded no contest last month to aggravated theft after stealing more than $50,000 of property attached to his former Damascus home, one of the few such cases in Oregon or across the country to result in prosecution. He will be sentenced Sept. 22.

This guy was thorough, he even took the outlets! Seriously, they cost $1.5 at home depot, I'm thinking their street value is pretty much zip. This guy was serious. Unfortunately it's likely to cost him four years in jail.

"Banks, which usually can recoup losses from insurance claims, rarely take the time and effort to report theft of home fixtures. But law enforcement officials say nearby residents, eager to preserve their own home values, are starting to turn in their former neighbors.

That's what happened in the Bogoslavets case. Neighbors tipped off police when they saw Bogoslavets return to his former home with a van after vacating the premises. Investigators discovered Bogoslavets had taken nearly everything he could remove, including the kitchen island, fireplace, bathtubs, the doorbell and electrical outlets."

The morale? If you're losing your house to foreclosure think twice about gutting it, it's just not worth it.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Glad they are finally prosecuting these people. Do this in my neighborhood and I'll turn you in too! Good site, but I will only post here if I don't get flamed. I used to post on Charles Turners site and got flamed all the time. Forget that, I don't need the hassle of strangers calling me names over my opinions. So I stopped posting over there.

I am curious about increasing interest rates and how they will affect when the bottom is called. How cheap does the house have to be to offset increasing interest rates? I remember Portland housing costing as low as $10,000 in the Alberta Arts district. (1990). A nice house in Hawthorne could be had for $60,000 around that time. Of course interest rates were around 21% and no one could afford the payments back then.

funky

PDX Outsider said...

Welcome funky, I try to keep things civil here. Differences in opinions are welcome, name calling is not. If you need to resort to name calling you probably don't have a good argument anyway, and I am willing to edit if needed. But I've only had to do that once or twice so far.

Brad the Builder said...

Unbelievable! About tim ethese guys were punished for their cromes. Been getting away with it for too long now!