For some of you piggs that keep griping about irresponsible “buyers” who get to live rent free as they squat in their homes waiting to get forclosed only for the forclosures to get delayed and delayed….
Good news….You have the opportunity now to live in a nice place and pay a lot less rent…..legally
Renters, their furnishings being used to sell vacant high-end homes
By Roger Showley Union-Tribune Staff Writer
2:00 a.m. May 11, 2009
Johnna Clavin won the bid to be a temporary resident in a $1.2 million Oceanside home, which means she pays $800 a month and provides her own furnishings. She has to be ready to move out when the house sells.
– JOHN GASTALDO / Union-TribuneMary Heineke had seen it all before: empty, high-end homes, their owners long gone, and would-be buyers wondering where they’d place their furniture.
And so she restarted her house-management service, whose “resident managers” rent vacant homes at a discount, fill them with their own furniture, artwork and knickknacks and promise to maintain them in “show-ready” condition when buyers and agents drop in.
“You look at a vacant house and an occupied house: one you see as distressed, the other not distressed and worth the money,” Heineke said.
In the early 1990s, Heineke, who holds a real estate license, worked with lenders to have house managers occupy more than 650 properties in California. When the market picked up, she concentrated on home design and marketing projects until the recent slump resulted in high-end homes taking months, even years, to sell.
In return for promising to be neat, mow the grass and fulfill 27 other obligations in an 18-page agreement, the temporary residents get to enjoy million-dollar homes at a fraction of the usual rent until the property is sold.
But they have to be ready to move out on five days’ notice, perhaps into another of Heineke’s empty homes needing a little interim love.
“Many of the people we interview we know can’t actually afford the house at this time,” Heineke said, but may have in the past or could in the future.
More important is what they own that would lend a unique feel to a home on the market – a Chinese chest, French provincial cupboard and “museum-quality” items.
“They have the ability to furnish it and have the taste to maintain it,” she said.
The result is a house staged to sell but with real people and their stuff on view, as if they were the owners. They’re a form of housesitter, paying to live in someone else’s house but with their own things around them.
“It’s absolutely true that it is much easier to sell an occupied home than than an unoccupied home, depending on who’s occupying it and what they’re doing with it,” said Beth Peece, a Studio City real estate agent and treasurer of the California Association of Realtors.
Operating as QualityFirst Home Marketing, a division of McCarthy Holthus Real Estate Corp., Heineke began visiting local real estate offices this year and advertising for guest residents.
The first to settle in was Johnna Clavin, 45, who moved into a new, 2,600-square-foot Oceanside home with a view in March. She had returned from New York City, where after six weeks managing a large estate, she was dismissed. The FBI had indicted the owner on fraud charges.
Clavin responded to Heineke’s ad, as did 45 other hopefuls, and she won the bid to live in a $1.2 million home for $800 a month, surrounded by her stuff. She had one advantage over the other applicants: an article on her organizational skills that she submitted to Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine.
“I’m not required to do anything other than be immaculate,” she said.
And if the home sells, she hopes to move to another Heineke house: “I’m a gypsy – whatever happens, happens.”
The current real estate market has followed a downward spiral from the peak median home price of $517,500 in 2005 to $285,000 in San Diego County. In the current selling environment, dominated by low-cost foreclosures, it can take a year or two for a million-dollar property to sell.
In Poway, recently widowed Virginia Pantone, 86, had moved out of her 3,880-square-foot custom house, completed in 1992 in Poway’s High Valley, to the Remington Club development in Rancho Bernardo.
She hoped a dentist would fulfill his lease-to-own agreement for the property, listed at up to $2.5 million. But he moved out April 1 after seven months and now the home is listed at $1.05 million.
“I couldn’t take care of it all – it was too much,” Pantone said.
Then her real estate agent, Amy M. Farber of Coldwell Banker, heard Heineke’s spiel and suggested Pantone consider the resident home manager option.
“She was a little worried about going up there every day to make sure the doors were closed and that there were no water leaks, that the (avocado) trees were watered,” Farber said.
Pantone at first thought the arrangement was unfair, since the resident pays rent to Heineke and the owner pays a $1,500 relocation bonus if the home sells within three months. But on second thought, she saw the benefits.
“I don’t have to worry about it – it’s much nicer,” she said. Her son, an attorney, looked over the contract and said it seemed fine to him.
Owners do not have veto power over who moves in, but Heineke has a say-so in how the home is furnished and decorated. Owners continue to pay mortgage, taxes and fire insurance, while residents handle minor maintenance and utility bills.
Heineke began looking for someone with furniture and artwork appropriate to the contemporary design – with its soaring open-beam ceiling, a wall of empty bookshelves and a backyard begging for a barbecue to go with the sweeping view to valley and ocean beyond.
Among those applying for the job was Katie Foley, who knows a thing or two about staging homes for sale.
“I recently relocated to California with my son from Dubai, where I lived and was a designer for seven years on palaces and super-deluxe villas and six-star hotels,” Foley said.
Foley and Ryan, 11, moved back to her native Ireland, then New York and Texas before landing in Cardiff. She says she has three 40-foot pods in storage with plenty of furniture and fixtures to fill Pantone’s house.
“It’s beautiful, so nice, with lots of windows, very modern,” she said.
Its features include a four-car garage and basement bonus room, complete with kitchen, bath and bedroom.
“It should be staged according to the architecture, absolutely, to bring out the best in the property,” Foley said. “That’s how I envision it.”
Heineke said she pays special attention to applicants’ motivations. Besides performing background credit checks, she Googles them and checks out their Facebook pages.
“I make sure they are who they say they are,” she said. “What I’m looking for is something they didn’t share with me in the interview.”
She ultimately picked a Colorado couple moving from a 10,000-square-foot home with furniture and artwork that would fit the Pantone home. In the meantime, real estate agent Farber said Pantone has received a purchase offer from a potential buyer, and if it is accepted, a resident manager probably won’t be needed.
House managers must initial 29 items in Appendix B of the “independent contractor services agreement” that takes the place of the typical rental agreement.
The first requirement: “Keep the home in ‘MARKET TO SELL’ condition. When leaving, the beds are made; the dishes washed & out of sight; floor vacuumed/cleaned, if needed; everything in its place and ready to be shown.”
Other provisions: no pets or smoking indoors, no garage sales, no leaving town for more than 72 hours without notifying Heineke and no contacting the owner or leasing agent. All communications go through her.
Susie Wick, another applicant for the Pantone home, said she was fine with the requirements and didn’t mind the prospect of bouncing from house to house over the next two years.
“It’s much easier today to live more mobile like this than ever before,” she said. “I think I’m a good person for this kind of thing.”
So for the people who bought nice “stuff” with the profits made from their HELOC/refi cash-outs before getting foreclosed – a perfect way to make that stuff work for them.
So for the people who bought nice “stuff” with the profits made from their HELOC/refi cash-outs before getting foreclosed – a perfect way to make that stuff work for them.
So for the people who bought nice “stuff” with the profits made from their HELOC/refi cash-outs before getting foreclosed – a perfect way to make that stuff work for them.
So for the people who bought nice “stuff” with the profits made from their HELOC/refi cash-outs before getting foreclosed – a perfect way to make that stuff work for them.
So for the people who bought nice “stuff” with the profits made from their HELOC/refi cash-outs before getting foreclosed – a perfect way to make that stuff work for them.
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