Free Fall Friday - 4340 SE Madison

Here's another house with an interesting history. 4340 SE Madison.

The house sold for $305k in February 2006. It then sold again for $541 in June 2006 (with 100% financing!), a gain of 77% in just 4 months. It went into foreclosure and was bought back by the bank for $355k in October. Last month it sold to the proud new owner's for $295k. That's 45% off it's high!

Unfortunately the property taxes adjusted upwards to reflect the new $541k price, jumping from $2858 to $4373 in 2007. Ouch.

I don't have insights into what happened along the way, but judging by the state of the pool it was likely vacant for a period of time. Any Realtors out there know the details of any of the recent sales?

I also start to question Zillow's methodology with cases like this. If you look at their home value chart (you'll need to click on the 5 year view for the best picture) it was quick to reset upwards with the sale in June 06, but hasn't come back down to reflect the recent sale price. And after all the best indicator of what something is worth is what someone else will pay for it, in this case $295k, not $496k.

What's that smell you ask? Something between fishy and fraud methinks.

Absentee landlords beware!

My wife stumbled across this listing (MLS #8024635) over the weekend, and liked how the house sat up high on the hill. So before we looked any further I decided to pop over to Zillow and get the scoop on the location, and what Zillow thought it was worth.

At first I was a little puzzled by the photos posted on Zillow (4804 N Borthwick), but then I realized they must have been posted by the tenants. We found this info an the subject of who can post photos to Zillow:

"Who Can Upload Photos?
Anyone can upload photos of a house — owners, agents, neighbors — anyone! Since Zillow is a community site, we want everyone to contribute — even your neighbors or someone who has lived in the house 20 years ago. Photos uploaded by owners and agents will show up first. Also, community-uploaded photos cannot be deleted, but if you see something that doesn't look right or is inappropriate, please click the "Flag content" link and Zillow Customer Support will review it."

This photo shows the rotting windowsill with the title "massive water going in", other photos show the moisture in the walls and other fun discoveries.This is not the first house I've seen in the Mississippi area that appears to have been bought by investors, never had any maintenance, and is now being unloaded for what they hope is a tidy profit.

To all the absentee landlords out there: be careful what you try to get away with, your tenants now have more and more tools at their disposal to let the rest of us know just what you're up to, or not up to.

Good luck trying to sell this one. We'll check back and see how much it gets marked down over the next few months.