It’s always a great feeling to help someone on the financial edge find a place to call home. Even after more than a decade in the real estate profession, I can remember like yesterday each and every time I worked overtime with a particular client others had rejected and helped them reach beyond what they had imagined.
When the current, still worsening sub-prime mortgage mess surfaced, I couldn’t help but remember two clients who were able to buy homes, even with very poor credit, only because of the opportunities they found to secure mortgages through eager sub-prime lenders.
At the closing table, I remember advising these families to formulate a plan – by necessity, a short term plan -- to clear up credit issues and refinance to get out from under the shocking 13 percent interest rate that would, otherwise inevitably, devour them whole when the interest reset in two years. The idea of those absurd new rates sent chills down my spine; there would be no way those bills could be paid unless these people won the lottery. The fierce drive to BE a homeowner sometimes isn’t enough.
When I started in real estate, my first broker assigned me a foreclosure property, a dinky little house with a suspicious underground oil tank and a tremendous leak from the second-floor bathroom that was on its way to caving in the kitchen ceiling. Over the course of my half-year nursing that property, the former owners broke into the basement of the house several times to smoke and drink beer. It seemed weird to me at the time, weird and creepy.
I knew they had fallen catastrophically behind in their mortgage payments and were unceremoniously locked out of their house, their meager possessions dumped on the front lawn for everyone to see. Embarrassment. Ugliness. All of it was there, strewn like so much garbage near the curb.
In their own way, coming back after dark and sitting in a dark, cold, moist basement, might have been a form of closure for that sad little house which they once called home.
These days, I’m more aware than I have been in a very long time what it means to see overgrown grass licking up against houses with cracked paint and dirty windows. It’s easy to go to RealtyTrac.com and see if these houses are on their way to auction. When I do, I understand that without money, nothing is sacred, that families now having to pick up their possessions, must also move somewhere else even if they don’t have the funds for 1.5 months security on a rental. All those hopes and dreams of home ownership, fueled by family, friends, pretty TV commercials, solicitous real estate agents, have been dashed. They are starting on square one again.
Closure -- now that will take time.
