San Francisco The first organizing meeting in Detroit of the Home Savers Campaign had spirited discussion when families discovered that they only had one thing in common in the contracts they had signed with Vision Property Management or its subsidiaries: the contract itself. When it came to the terms, to everyone’s shock and anger, everyone had a different deal!
The differences were not simply where we might expect to find them in the price of the houses they were hoping to buy or the number of years to term. In fact the prices were all very close to each other. As the campaign has come to expect from visiting so many families in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Akron, Youngstown, and now Detroit, some families attending the meeting were still shocked to find out that in seven years they would not own the home as they expected, but simply face wrenching choices between balloon payments, long term agreements, or walking away from extensive investments in money and labor in repairs.
The differences in the contracts were huge. Excitedly talking about their contracts, they found for example that in some contracts as little as $14 of their monthly payment was going to principle on the purchase while in others as much as $150 was being applied. That was often the case when the payments were virtually identical. In several cases, they discovered they had not been clearly told how much of their payment was going to principle at all. Even when the purchase price of the houses were roughly equivalent, families were finding that the amount of their monthly payment being applied for insurance was often different.
Looking at the question of tax payment which is especially freighted with concern, since nonpayment of taxes to the county could lead to loss of the property on tax delinquency sales. Only one family could determine from their payment the amount that was supposedly being paid to taxes, while the other families at this first organizing meeting became worried that since there was no indication, Vision might not be paying their taxes at all. Even in the one case where the tax level was stated at $150 per month or $1800 per year, there was skepticism that the house valued so modestly really was sustaining such a relatively high cost compared to true value.
Many of the people at the meeting were also on their second contract with Vision. The first had given them up to 45 days to make good on their payments, while the more recent gave Vision the right to void their option to purchase if they were late on the payments at all, making the contracts essentially no more than rental agreements, despite the fact that this was a triple-net lease with the “buyer” paying everything including thousands and thousands in repairs. One family was livid having invested over $50,000 in repairs, yet still debating whether or not they should walk away. Everyone at the meeting shared stories of about the “fishing” Vision’s representatives did with them over the phone to try and suss out the amount families had invested themselves in repairs, presumably for the company to guess whether the property might have been fixed off enough for them to seize the first opportunity to evict and flip.
People were happy to meet, but that was the only happiness in the room once the members and organizers cleared the fog away that hung over the legalese of the agreements. There was anger and plans for quick action. On the question of fight or flight, people were ready to fight. Powered by people, the campaign now begins in earnest.