Comments

1
He puts a lot of time into finding all this and he has to pay his own bills somehow. Charging rent is kind of fucked up but we live in a fucked up time and it is the best idea out of several terrible options.
2
And presumably a portion of the rent is also going to paying for upkeep and maintenance, as well as renovation of other homes. It's not like this guy is charging slumlord rents, I would imagine $300 for a sizeable home in FL would be considered a veritable bargain by just about anybody - except the DA and the banks, apparently.

Seriously, if anyone is at fault here it's the deadbeat owners who abandoned these houses in the first place, and the greedy banks that would rather sit on habitable property until they can figure out how to make a profit on it.
3
I wholly agree that this guy is doing many people a service, so long as he doesn't fight tooth-and-nail with the real owners when they eventually try to take possession of the houses.

I'd hate to see people being kicked out onto the street, but this really needs to be seen as a really great "hand-up" opportunity, not a long-term solution on its own to someone being homeless.
4
there is no true altruism retards. still its not exactly a legal business plan i imagine. but the law is merely a steamroller.
5
Chaotic Good !
6
This is a much saner economic plan than Ben Bernanke's scheme to pump up the DOW with paper hanging.
7
As someone who lived next to a foreclosed home with dozens of containers of gasoline, motor oil, paints, pesticides, and herbicides left in the driveway and side-yard, along with cardboard boxes of clothing, who tried for months to determine ownership or get city or county officials to do something about it, and who finally had to browbeat the real-estate agent into cleaning it up by basically threatening public shaming...

I'm all for this kind of thing.
8
@5,
Nice one!

Chaotic good always tended to be my default alignment for new characters... it seems so versatile.
9
Anything to stick it to the out-of-state millionaire absentee landlords is good, man.
10
What I want to know is, if he rents these out long enough, say a year or two, could he then evict the residents and claim ownership to all of the properties? To evict them all he'd need to do is triple the rent. The tenants wouldn't be able to afford it and would move out. Because he had established himself as a legal landlord over an extended period, wouldn't the houses all be his free and clear? I am skeptical about this guy at best.
11
@10: If they don't acknowledge what he's doing in 7 years, he can, yeah.
12
It's less than $300 a month for a two bedroom house. In my middle class neighborhood in Clearwater, standard rents are around $1 per square foot. So...sounds like the folks get a bargain, the guy gets some of the money back for the renovations, the neighborhood gets one less blighted house, the county gets one more tax check, and the banks get one less toxic asset. I can't think of any way in which this goes wrong.

Except for the original homeowner. The bank foreclosed on them because they had default insurance, so there was no reason for them to work with the owner to help him/her stay in the house and keep it from being repossessed and subsequently blighted in the first place. Dang.
13
This is great, especially if he's ploughing the money back into the homes. I think the US needs a new Homestead Act. Instead of nabbing the Indians' land, find an abandoned house. Make improvements and live in it for five years, and it's yours, free and clear.
14
Property is Theft. Therefore, theft of Property is?
15
Whatever we can do to fuck the banks is fine by moi.
16
Well, if he actually gets convicted of some sort of crime, then he gets free room and board courtesy of the state for a while. Everybody wins!
17
Adverse Possession rocks. Use it or lose it! Too bad it takes ten years in Washington.
18
What does he do if they don't make rent?
19
These don't sound like owners who will be coming back. They couldn't be reached. And there's a "public nuisance" sticker on the house? More power to this guy. He sounds like a visionary to me.

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