This is incredible given some of the listings. The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64389615
I suppose leading with a picture of it actually on fire is better than a post or pre fire photo.
Here's the thing about getting a house loan: If you try to buy a house for too far under or over market value and can't explain why it's that far under market value, it sets off all sorts of red flags for lenders. Before we bought that house we passed on another because it was a unicorn in its neighborhood and our agent was having a terrible time coming up with documentation of comparable listings in a reasonable distance from the house. And then I discovered water damage and we bailed.
If you buy it for 15% under market and have a bunch of inspections that say why, that's less of a problem.
Insurance policies have some queer rules that all insurers share - perhaps due to building code, or maybe due to a common reinsurer?
Your floor cannot have more than 50mm (two inches) drop between two corners of the house, as it can’t be insured. Unless you can show the unlevel floor existed pre-earthquake, in which case you can get insurance! Wierd.
Now, there are laws against misrepresentation. There is a disclosure form that is required which asks you about defects. The seller can admit them or decline to answer, but if the seller knowingly lies about a property defect you can sue to recover damages.
Real estate agents have a lot of liability here because they are bound to disclose things that could have been “reasonably known” - which is a definition that can be tortured in every direction. For example, bedrooms: in my state a bedroom must have a closet to count as a bedroom. Except sometimes it doesn’t have to have a closet to count as a bedroom. The exceptions are literally described as “some older homes had bedrooms without closets” - but “older” and “bedrooms” is left to the interpretation of your legal council and the investigator when it becomes an issue.
I do like imagining trying to sell it during the fire based on apparent damage done and the perceived capabilities of the fire dept. in stopping it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFwS_Dqd-IU
(Scene from Synecdoche, New York.)
Why is the BBC clarifying what country Manchester is in but omitting where Tennessee is? Very strange for a British publication.
You'd have to bulldoze that flat and start from scratch.
Except this part:
> because it's cheaper to buy a new one.
is not true. A write-off is because the repairs exceed the fair market value of the thing being written off. But the thing is used, not new. The fair market value is likely to be well below the cost of replacing it with something new.
No, it just means insurers are assholes rigging the game.
A simple example: my personal MacBook broke. MacBooks are written off in 5 years. My insurer only wants to pay the surplus value (€200).
I tell them okay, instead of the €200 find me a replacement MacBook of the same model and year with approximately the same config. “Sorry sir we don’t do that.”
Okay, do they think I can find the same MacBook for €200? “Probably not sir..”
Fuck insurers.
The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.
There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.
In both cases, the marketing was correct. It's sorta a miss for the article author to not understand that.
The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.
There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.
HGTV, eat your heart out.
If you're in the business of making content and advertising yourself... I could see how buying a burnt mansion would be compelling.
At the end of the day, my perspective is that builders like decreasing risk.
Anything saved after a fire is a risk. What's still structurally sound? If so, what are its new limits?
Custom = time and money. And everything in a post-catastrophic damage rebuild is custom.
Sure you can do it, but it might be cheaper (from a total cost perspective) to demolish and rebuild from scratch.
American lifestyle is so wasteful. It’s disgusting. Climate change is impacting everyone and these rich assholes continue to waste resources on shit like this.
Yes, for example, people who think it's a bad idea to show a picture of that house on fire.
You can't hide the fact it's burned before. It would be illegal. Making it clear so the potential clients think it's cheap is your best chance.
For anyone else who wanted to see that one specifically.
Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.