Investors fuel Detroit’s ‘Landlord Nation’
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If you think things are bad in Southern California, Detroit’s emergence as a ‘landlord nation’ may give you an idea of how much worse things could get. From the Associated Press at latimes.com:
Welcome to Landlord Nation, where foreclosure notices are plentiful and for-sale signs offer at least 1,800 homes for under $10,000 that once were worth at least 10 times more.In extreme cases, homes are on sale for $1 or less, which has enticed investors to Detroit from as far away as the United Kingdom and Australia.
Hmm, you would think the film ‘Money Pit’ would have made it to those parts of the world.
Detroit now has the lowest ownership rate for single-family detached homes of the 20 largest cities in the country, according to data analyzed by longtime Detroit demographer Kurt Metzger.Even the sale of U.S. Housing and Urban Development homes has been impacted by the poor housing climate in Detroit. The average sales prices of such homes plunged from $46,702 in 2003 to $8,692 last year. Through the first month of 2009, average sales were $6,035.Still, not all of Detroit’s real estate market has bottomed out. Listings include a seven-bedroom, 11,580-square-foot Tudor in Detroit’s historic Indian Village neighborhood for $849,900, and a $765,000 penthouse condo in the city’s Albert Kahn Building.
One person’s disaster can be another’s ‘investor’s dream,’ as the story says. In this case, though, I don’t see it. But it does put the Southland housing situation in perspective. We’ve still got a long way to go before we’ll be vying for the title of landlord nation.
--Lauren Beale
Thoughts? Comments?