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SCHENECTADY
City hopes ‘flips’ will sell more houses
Contractors can submit bids for fixer-uppers
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

There’s finally a market for imperfect houses in Schenectady, Mayor Gary McCarthy said.
After months of running open houses to spotlight the city’s best houses for sale, McCarthy said the backlog of good houses has dropped considerably.
Now he’s starting phase two of his project: getting new owners to take city-owned houses that aren’t yet good enough to move into.
    McCarthy’s looking for “people with a pioneer spirit” who want to flip houses after doing major renovations.
    He argues that Schenectady has more flippable houses than anywhere else in the Capital Region.
    “You can’t buy a house in Saratoga today and have an expectation you can double the value in any short period of time,” McCarthy said. “In Schenectady, you can.”
    But the average home buyer won’t get a chance at it. Building Inspector Eric Shilling said he’s seen too many programs fail because cities sold houses for pennies to enthusiastic amateurs.
    “Unfortunately, most of the people they’re selling to don’t have the wherewithal to do it or understand the full scope of what’s required to bring it up to code,” he said.
    So only experienced contractors need apply.
    Contractors won’t have to pay for the houses, but they will have to submit bids saying how much they think it will cost them to rehab the house. The contractor who submits the lowest bid will be given title to the house and will reap a profit when it’s resold.
    Beginning Sunday, the city will take bids on houses that are in foreclosure that need some work.
    No public money is involved in the transaction — the contractor pays for the work and materials and only gets paid when the house is resold.
    The program will start in the Goose Hill neighborhood, around Van Vranken Avenue. Shilling has evaluated foreclosed houses there to determine which ones could be renovated and still reap a signifi - cant profit when sold at market value.
    “The beautiful part is we’ve identified these,” Shilling said.
    Only the houses with the least risk — the ones best suited for flipping — will be offered, he said.
    “We’ve minimized the risk; we’ve maximized the opportunity to make profit,” he said.
    He said Goose Hill was chosen because Golub Corporation, Ellis Hospital and Union College are located there. City offi cials hope to market some houses to employees who want to walk to work.
    And with those institutions investing in the neighborhood, Shilling said, city offi cials wanted to acknowledge their work.
    “Let’s invest in the community directly adjacent to [them],” he said.
    Because the program requires no public funds, “an endless number” of houses could be rehabbed at once, Shilling said.
    All it needs is willing, and qualified, contractors. Most of them already have lines of credit for these sorts of projects, but he said KeyBank and others may offer loans as well. ................................>>>>..........................>>>>........................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01301&AppName=1

It's not the price or the condition of the houses it's the taxes.

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It's not the price or the condition of the houses it's the taxes.

............and the substandard school system, and the crime, and the crumbling infrastructure, and the gangs, and the drug dealers/addicts, and the pit bulls and the guns and no jobs!!!!

McMayor is going about this a$$backwards!!! You first have to create a safe, low taxed, sound community so people WANT to move there....not the other way around. What caliber of people does McMayor think he is going to attract?

I personally know of someone who picked up a few properties 10 years ago in the city for pennies on the dollar. While they are still waiting for their property to increase in value......they are renting them out to section 8 housing! And exactly WHO would buy a devalued, over taxed property NOW hoping it will increase in value???? TAXES WILL JUST GET EVEN HIGHER!!

Watch that Focus Construction get in on the deal.   The guy who did work for the city's "home improvement" program years ago while laundering drug money through the business.  

McC obviously doesn't know what flipping REALLY means.   It's buying cheap, using the cheapest products to fix up a house (like cheap chinese sheetrock, ya know), bargain store products, the absolute lowest end products, and lots of "cover-ups"  then sell it and the new owners find out about the cob jobs after they are already in the house.

Yes, contractor buy a house cheap at $30,000, use crap products to "fix", sell it for $100,000 and the new homeowner is saddled with a mortgage and a $5,000 tax bill and then winds up finding the problems and has no money to fix them.






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After the sub standard construction is discovered the code enforcers can swoop in and fine the new owner for violations.

And many folks who have bought these 'flipped' homes are required to go to 'financial counseling' because they are a potential 'risk'!! FACT!

They're more flammable than flippable.

This McCarthy is out of his mind.  The reason "enthusiastic armatures" are buying the city property is because the seasoned professionals know better.  Professionals aren't buying and flipping NOT because they don't have the wherewithal required to bring the building up to code, but because they have a  knowledge of Schenectady, the crime problem, the school problems, and most importantly the city's FISCAL PROBLEMS.  Every time the city and school crank the taxes up to pay for the bloated government, value it taken away from the property.  

Smart people with money aren’t buying property in the city because they know that gives the government the easiest access to your money through property tax.  If you want to keep your savings, don’t buy property in a city with a huge budget shortfall.  They will take every penny they can get out of you.

They should be torn down. 1,000s of them and Habitats for humangitty should be shut down for building more slum houses for lowlives to ruin.

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“You can’t buy a house in Saratoga today and have an expectation you can double the value in any short period of time,” McCarthy said. “In Schenectady, you can.”

Is McCarthy on crack ?????

He should be drug tested.

People flip houses in Schenectady.  What does this say?  That half of the people who BUY property here don't even want to live here.  Tells you something.

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“You can’t buy a house in Saratoga today and have an expectation you can double the value in any short period of time,” McCarthy said. “In Schenectady, you can.”

Is McC and his dems for real?     Take a house in Schenectady, overassessed at $100,000 when it's worth only $50,000.   Flip it, find a fool to buy it for $100,000 and the value goes down anyway because of the high taxes, but it remains overasessed.  

And of course, the houses may be be low value because they are outdated because the owners couldn't afford to renovate/update because the dems stole their money to build lavish buildings for the millionaires downtown and then the millionaires were designated as tax exempt, so that caused the TAXABLE tax base to plummet which caused the taxes on the homeowners to go up more, which resulted in homeowners not only without money to renovate/update, the homeowners didn't even have the money to fix things that NEEDED fixing, so the city dems swooped down on them and charged them with code violations and forced them to make repairs.   But in order to make repairs the homeowners had to take out loans which put them in debt which caused them to be unable to pay their tax bills which caused their houses to be seized and now there are houses that are outdated, worth little, abandoned, and McC has the NERVE to come out and say, "oh, look at this house, you can buy it for $50,000 and flip it and the value will double in a short time and he thinks that's good.

But the problem is, WHO will buy the flipped houses?   WHO will buy a house that will have a $6,000 tax bill?

The problem is that the flipped houses or not, it will be the HOMEOWNER who will be paying the property and school tax bills of the millionaires downtown.

McC needs to ORDER his dept heads and all the cops and firefighters to buy these houses IN the city.

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“You can’t buy a house in Saratoga today and have an expectation you can double the value in any short period of time,” McCarthy said. “In Schenectady, you can.”

Oh, watch DV aka ham aka glory come on here and cheer that the renaissance continues because of this comment.

DUH.  This must have been the dems scam all along.   Deliberately do  things to cause property values to plummet and then try to claim that they have improved the city because the values can double in a "short period of time."

This is McC's explanation.   Take a $100,000 house, reduce it's value to $50,000 via high taxes, ignoring crime, ignoring neighborhoods, ignore the constituents, then find a program for cheap renovation and claim that only in Schenectady can your house value double in value.

But of course, the taxes will still be the highest around and no one will want to buy.

Haven't I written SEVERAL times, no,  NUMEROUS times, questioning why DV TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY REFUSES to buy a house IN the city to live in.   I have said many times that because the FACT is that property values are so very low, that IF the city was in this grand renaissance that DV claims it is, then why is he REFUSING to buy while the cost is low since allegedly the values would go up?


And DV ABSOLUTELY CANNOT refute what I just said.


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Guys,

There is no downside to this.

Properties owned by the city, with no tax revenue coming in...  Once we "give it" to the contractor, they start paying taxes on that property (I hope)...   Best case they fix it up, sell it - and the home is generating tax revenue.

Worst case, contractor goes under, doesn't finish, doesn't pay taxes.  Which is the situation today.

Yeah the city is falling apart due to mismanagement by current and previous leadership.  Yes civilization is declining with the lack of good parenting driving our value system into the gutter.

And while I'm still skeptical this will work - I don't see any downside at all right now.

Joe

This will not reduce peoples' tax BILLS however.

The tax RATE will fluctuate but the tax BILLS will remain HIGH

And THAT is because the dems keep spending like there's no tomorrow, and they make the homeowners foot the bill for the millionaires.

And no matter what, an equal house outside the city will pay FAR LESS in taxes and that includes Saratoga.

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