Woman’s £80,000 Home Now Worth Only £1

If you’ve been complaining lately that your home lost some value in the recent real estate downturn, quit your bitchin’ - it could be a lot worse. British homeowner Jane Archer got the shock of her life this week: her 3-bedroom bungalow with uninterrupted sea views in the small Norfolk village of Happisburg was appraised at just £1 ($2). The property had previously been worth £80,000 ($157,000). The reason? Chronic coastal erosion.

From Money.co.uk:

When the Mum of three originally purchased the property for £20,000 ($39,000) in 1987 it sat over 400 metres from the striking coastline. Now just 60 meters of land separates her bungalow from the sea. This leaves her faced with the prospect that after 20 years of mortgage payments her family home is now worth less than a loaf of bread.

Ms Archer and her partner Chris Cutting had planned to use the property as collateral for a business loan and arranged the valuation accordingly. The couple’s intention was to expand their car repair business with the funds raised. However, to add insult to injury they have now lost out on an additional £60,000 ($118,000) by backing out of the deal.

Several homes and a long stretch of road have already been lost to sea after the wooden groynes that previously protected the 80ft high cliffs began to fail. A 12th century church and listed lighthouse are soon set to follow, along with the many other houses and businesses in the village, as Happisburg is left to slip into the sea.

Apparently, the British government stopped ‘coastal defense measures’ in smaller towns to focus on protecting ‘main resorts’ from the sea. There is no kind of compensation scheme in place to reimburse families like the Archers, who stand to lose everything they’ve worked for.

Link [Money.co.uk]

Officials in California Filling Pools with Mosquito Fish

For months, there have been little mentions here and there about how officials all over the country are worried about mosquitoes breeding in the brackish pools behind abandoned, foreclosed homes. You would think that the standard response would be a) drain the freaking pools, b) put forth some kind of community effort to either get people back in the homes or c) drop some mosquito dunks in there. But, the brilliant officials in California have decided that mosquito-larvae-eating fish are the solution.

From Treehugger:

The mortgage crisis is not only wrecking peoples’ lives, it’s not doing much good for the environment, either. The swimming pools of abandoned homes are perfect mosquito breeding grounds, there are worries about rampant West Nile Virus infections. In California, authorities are using airplanes to find green pools and are filling them with the Gambusia affinis, or mosquito fish, which eats the larvae.

“They are real heroes,” says Josefa Cabada, a technician at the Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District, a government agency, in the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve never seen a mosquito in a pool with mosquito fish.”

The problem (despite the obvious one of, uh, fish in swimming pools) is that these fish wreak havoc on each new ecosystem they’re placed in. They’ve displaced native species all over the world, and are apparently ‘master escape artists’, able to travel in as little as 3 millimeters of water.

Surely, there is a better solution than this – it sounds like a story in The Onion.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: DAVID CARLSON / The Californian

Buy One House, Get One Free

Top sign the housing market is still going downhill: when you purchase one McMansion, you get a smaller yet still ‘luxurious’ row home free. No kidding. One San Diego real estate developer has clearly gotten very, very desperate to sell homes.

From the LA Times:

We thought, ‘Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants? Why not buy one home, get one free,’” Dawn Berry of Michael Crews Development told 10 News in San Diego.

More: “Michael Crews Development is offering new, 2000-square foot cityscape row-homes worth $400,000 in Escondido for free — if you buy one Royal View Estate home in San Pasqual Valley starting at $1.6 million. ‘You know it’s a straight-up legit deal; no prices have been increased, there are no hidden costs. Michael is just giving away a free home for people that buy at Royal View,’ said Berry.”

“Adam Rossman of Michael Crews Development added, ‘People have been coming in saying, ‘How can you do this?’ Well, it’s our way of dealing with current market conditions to move some inventory.’ “

Another real estate development company, Toll Brothers, posted a $93.7 million dollar loss last quarter, so clearly things aren’t going so well, even in previously booming areas like Southern California. In previous years, when the real estate market in such areas was so hot that it was incredibly difficult to find an affordable home, developers like these saw their bank accounts growing distended as they built more and more subdivisions, condos and retail space with the assumption that all units would easily be sold.

Considering the greed in the development industry, I think it’s poetic justice that they’re finding the rug pulled out from under them – how many times did they find loopholes in laws and ignore the public’s wishes so they could build a mini mall on natural, untouched land?

Link [LA Times] + [Huffington Post]

Green Bonus! Bad Real Estate Market Means More Parks and Nature Preserves

Just a couple short years ago, real estate developers were spending money like Lindsay Lohan in a liquor store. They would snatch up nearly any property, with no particular plans in mind, but confident that they’d be able to build McMansions, strip malls or ubiquitous corner drugstores without a problem. Once the market crashed, developers were left sitting on tons of property they couldn’t unload and no longer had the cash to build on. Luckily for us, that means they’ve resorted to selling it for use as public parks, nature preserves and other low-cost uses.

From the Wall Street Journal:

One of the big beneficiaries is Trust for Public Land, a San Francisco nonprofit group that specializes in buying land for conservation. The Trust often struggled during property-boom years to find sellers among land owners near urban centers. Now, U.S. property owners from Massachusetts to Hawaii are flocking to it.

In addition to the Trust, the Nature Conservancy, Arlington, Va., is among the national groups working on similar deals. Their purchases tend to be larger — involving thousands of acres. “Two to three years ago, local farmers and ranchers were eager to sell off their land and cash out,” says the Nature Conservancy’s Cristina Mestre. “Now, we’re being approached en masse” to buy development rights.

In rural Minnesota, thousands of former Camp Fire girls rallied to stop a 71-acre camp from being turned over for development. The property had operated as a Camp Fire camp for 77 years until being closed two years ago. But last August the developer failed to secure $5 million in financing, say officials of Camp Fire USA’s Minnesota Council. They have since begun negotiations to sell the property for $3.8 million to the Trust, which proposes to convert it into a regional park, says Andrea Platt Dwyer, chief executive officer of the Minnesota Council. She expects a deal to close by December.

So, not only do we get more untouched natural land out of the deal, we also have less crappy hastily built condo developments going up all over the U.S. Sweet. Huzzah for bad subprime mortgages!

Link [Wall Street Journal]
Photo credit: Flickr user Drylcon