(Newswire.net via Emailnewswire.com March 25,2013) Tampa Bay Florida
The Tampa Bay Times in their Sunday March 24 edition wrote about the long list of large companies invading the Florida market to purchase large packages of foreclosed homes lingering on the market and turning them into rentals. Some of them are: The Blackstone Group, 1,000 homes, Silver Bay Realty Trust 400 homes, America Home 4 Rent 500 homes, Fundamental REO 90 homes, American Home Real Estate Investment Trust 100 homes and various other investors hoping to get a better return on investment that is available elsewhere.
In some case they will become property managers for large amounts of individual single family homes that have tenants on a scale that has not been attempted successfully before. It will be interesting to watch how this progresses especially when bad tenants infiltrate their properties and they realize how difficult a business that property management really is.
Along with the difficulties of property management and keeping their properties in quality shape to resell at the end of their investment term, there are other surprises in store for them. They search for newer foreclosed properties when they add them to their portfolio, usually those that have been built between 2001 to 2010, those targeted were owned by people who walked away or lost them because they were hopelessly under water on their mortgage and could not get the banks to work with them by reducing mortgage payment through modification. These investment groups feel that they now can rent these properties to all of those people for a high monthly rent and build equity and cash-in as the real estate market improves.
Many of these newer homes have a hidden time bomb in them that is being overlooked, that is the homes that have contaminated drywall manufacturered by the chinese or american companies installed in them causing a toxic environment for those living in them. How many homes are affected certainly thousands and the estimates go up to as many as 100,000 homes are affected.
It is such a problem the US government who is the owner of many of these homes because they took over FNMAE and Freddie Mac, is stymied as to what should be done. They passed a watered down Chinese drywall bill as the final official act of the last Congress and the President signed it, but it doesn’t address the problem. It is almost like they are trying to liquidate their supply of these home by selling them cheaply to these large investment fund groups thereby passing them on.
This contaminated drywall is difficult to detect at best, at first it was blamed on the chinese manufacturers, but it later was determined that american manufacturers have a hand in the mess also.
A good source of information on this would be a disable veteran by the name of Charles Hummer in North Port, Florida who has been sounding the alarm about the problem vocally for the last four years to anyone who would listen and on his recent website and You Tube video Contaminated American Drywall.
His drywall became so toxic he moved out to a tent in his back yard a few years ago because it put he and his wife in the hospital numerous times.
Unfortunately some people can live in these homes not noticing the problem because air conditioning or open windows mask the problem. In the case of these rentals all repairs will be done by the landlords and most people will not detect it until they or their family become ill from the sulphur fume off gasing.
The interesting part of this will be if the landlords, property managers, look closely at their homes or will they ignore the problem and try to maximize their return on investment and then resell them? Eventually I fear that families will suffer and the lawsuits will come from all the tenants that were harmed in these toxic environments.
Contact Information
Jerry Tetro
(727) 397-9826
http://chinesedrywallflorida.org
hammersmith@tampabay.rr.com