What about Flippers?

[omega minimo]

Folks, while we're counting our blessings and pointing fingers,
looking for someplace to plant a garden and wondering where our water supply comes from,
wondering where our retirement or our health insurance and/or our jobs have gone,
blaming Welfare Queens addicted to Ketchup driving Pink Cadillacs to their sub-prime mortgaged homes,
What about Flippers?

The toxic real estate assets on the ground level being sold to folks in WAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overestimated speculator markets that were never going to end and when the music stopped everyone assumed some other sucker would be left holding the bag...

....are directly related to the toxic bundled assets on the high finance level being sold to folks in WAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overestimated speculator markets that were never going to end and when the music stopped everyone assumed some other sucker would be left holding the bag.

At least in the first case there was an actual property, three dimensional, subject to the laws of time/space/gravity.

In the second there was -- thin air.

So with all this "resentment" people are feeling about mortgage assistance for those in need, is anyone upset at the Flippers who were instrumental in driving the local real estate markets up to absurdly overpriced levels that now have EVERYONE "upside down;" while they tackified our neighborhoods with cheap, quickie improvements and hideous McMansions?

[leftstreet]

1. Do they still have those 'flipper' teevee shows?

Gawd, I remember seeing some of those a few years back. I had to wonder whose brilliant idea it was - it seemed very planned.

Here's a REAL flipper

[omega minimo]

2. (wags head, spouts water)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5099586&mesg_id=5099586

[readmoreoften]

3. The discussion only shifts to flippers during a complaint fest about "irresponsible" owners.

Here's a paraphase:

"I'm a good person who pays their bills (i.e. came from an upper middle class home, went to school in the 70s or 80s when the cost of education wasn't insane, haven't lost their job YET, no big medical bills YET, etc.) and those skanky welfare mothers with forty-two children who bought big screen tvs and luxury homes are screwing me over!""

Response: "Not everyone who lost their home was irresponsible, what about economic hardship?"

"Are you trying to tell me all those house flippers in Vegas were under "hardship!" Give me a break?"

It's disgusting, selfish, blame-the-working-class, nonsense.

[omega minimo]

5. ah, thank you

[grasswire]

4. I'll give you something worse than flippers.

Rent skimmers and equity skimmers.

What's that?

A rent skimmer is a landlord who takes the rent but isn't paying the mortgage and plans to walk away while the renters are evicted by the bank. A felony in California, not illegal elsewhere.

An equity skimmer is someone who buys up a property cheap from someone who has held it for a long time, then borrows heavily against that equity and then walks away from the house.

Both of those scams are nothing but attacks on vulnerable people.

My family is victimized right now by a rent skimming landlady. She hasn't paid the mortgage since September, and the bank is going to sell the house out from under us. Woe, and misery.

[omega minimo]

6. yeah and those aren't making the news much. the whole cycle was a greedfest,

[jmowreader]

7. I have been anti-flipper for a long time

This sounds like a fun time to revive an old DU Tradition: Customers from Hell!

DUers who joined after the spring of 2008 weren't in on the fun when I reported some of the brain-dead morans I used to serve as a lumber associate at one of DU's favorite companies.

Today's candidates for retail immortality are all flippers.

Candidate Number One presented with this old, filthy, fucked-up, moldy-ass shingle. "I need one bundle of shingles that are exactly this color." We examined the forlorn piece of roofing and determined it was a shingle from a company that went out of business before Bernie and Arthur started The Home Depot. Better, it was this greenish-bluish-grayish thing with red flecks and even a little bit of purple that no roofing company in the world can match. I asked how the rest of the roof was. "Oh, about this bad. I only want to replace the shingles over the hole I made in the roof when I fell through." I told the guy if he had a roof so bad he fell through he probably needed to tear off everything above the joists and start from scratch. "No, I'm flipping the house so I'm just going to fix the hole."

Candidate Number Two presented with a 34-inch-wide front door she needed a storm door for. Now understand, you can get a 34-inch storm door...but they are more expensive than 32" or 36" doors because they're special order, two-week lead time. "No! I want a $99 storm door and I want to take it home today! Nothing fancy. I'm flipping the house."

Candidate Number Three wasn't quite that unreasonable. All he wanted to do was put insulation in the attic of the house he was flipping, and he didn't really understand why R-13 wasn't good enough. (R-30 is code in North Carolina.)

Candidate Number Four wanted to make his flip fancy so he decided to build a deck...out of untreated lumber. As far as I know, that's not allowed by code either.

Candidate Number Five decided to paint his flip with modern, bright, fashion-forward colors to make it more appealing. This doesn't mean he was going to spend any more money than he absolutely had to, though: he chose "Contractor Paint," which is so thin you can't add colorant to it. Says right on the can, "do not tint." I got screamed at for ten minutes over that. (I finally defused the situation by shaking the Contractor Paint, removing the lid and showing the paint to him. The product is the consistency of milk. He didn't even want it after that, and he let me hook him up with some okay paint.)

Candidate Number Six tried to caulk 20 windows with three tubes of sealant--99 cent per tube sealant.

Candidate Number Seven presented in his Chevrolet S-10, which I have referred to as the strongest, most powerful pickup ever built after seeing some of the weird shit people try to haul in them. This fucking guy bought 30 sheets of drywall that he wanted to haul off in an S-10. That's only 1800 pounds, right? Well, the asshole got all the way out of the parking lot, hit a pothole and broke his back axle so badly one of the wheels came off. I told him that was gonna happen, but do they listen?

Candidate Number Eight decided to flip a trailer. He didn't like the floor plan so he tore out all the interior walls...without propping up the ceiling. Don't do this. The roof collapsed in the middle of the night.

Candidate Number Nine saw "Flip That House" and decided he could do that too. Unfortunately, he didn't have any carpentry tools. I sold him his first hammer. As you probably guessed, he couldn't do that too.

And then there was Candidate Number Ten. This guy worked for a construction company. He decided he could get rich as a flipper, so he bought ten repos and started working on them after hours. Unfortunately, he ran out of money so he started using his company's commercial account to buy supplies for his own flips. You get five to ten for this level of embezzlement.

[omega minimo]

9. LOL Brilliant. Thanks for sharing

"Unfortunately, he didn't have any carpentry tools. I sold him his first hammer. As you probably guessed, he couldn't do that too."

Is every state now infested with these damn granite countertops? Generic mock orange and bark landscaping? Cheesy brass lamps? Ugly wrought iron fences? White plastic window frames?

[RB TexLa]

8. Hard for a flipper to drive up the price without buyers at the higher price.

Yes there were some that were left holding the bag when the market fell but until it did there were willing buyers. A seller is just someone with a house and a sign until there is a buyer.

[omega minimo]

10. Okay but a flipper is just someone who doesn't give and shit and does a lot of damage

to properties and markets where the destruction to the homes original fixtures/character are extreme, the result is repulsive and the price isn't worth it.

[Dover]

11. And what was the financial incentive to purchase and 'flip' houses?

You have to go back to the mortgage loan game. It was soooooo easy to purchase real estate...
of course they became a tool for investment rather than a 'home'.