Atlanta Visiting families involved with contract for deed agreements with big companies like Harbour Portfolio Advisers, Vision Property Management, and SG Capital in Atlanta turns out to be a much, much different experience than similar doors I’ve hit in recent months in Pittsburgh, Akron, Youngstown, and Detroit. The song is still basically the same, but the verses are different.
Yes, the contracts are “as is” with the burden of repairs, taxes, insurance, and everything else in the usual package on the buyer without any of the guarantees or protections of conventional home buying, but in Atlanta at least the “as is” is more than we have found elsewhere. There were roofs to fix, some with trees still protruding through, and sewer lines to wrangle and HVAC problems common in the South, but sure enough, since the best duct cleaning San Antonio tx can be found here, taking care HVAC problems was a cinch. In the outer reaches of Fulton County, my team had visited with families with home prices in the $20s and low $30s, but in southwest Atlanta where I spent most of my time yesterday the numbers tended to be high $30s and up to $50 and $60,000. Other teams in DeKalb and Clayton County were spread out with a wide range of prices.
Southwest Atlanta was a surprise to me. I’d been on the doors in Atlanta before, but when I started adding up the dates as I navigated BatchGeo from home to home on my visit list, it had been in the twenty to twenty-five year range. I used to tease people in New Orleans who moved to the suburbs of Jefferson Parish that if they were going to do that, they might as well live in Atlanta. On the doors though I found myself in the city, not 8 miles from the Capitol, in hills green with trees and huge quarter-acre home lots, where I sometimes thought I was in the country and I wanted to find more info. I also found blocks where five or six houses might be abandoned, boarded, and collapsing, and a couple of blocks over areas that were knocking on the door and opening it to gentrification. For the first time I was talking to contract buyers who were debating whether or not to try and figure out a way to sell their houses after the four or five years they had been in Vision or Harbour properties because appraisals had doubled and tripled the valuations, and in the words of one, he might be able to do better farther out in the country.
In one area, I was within walking distance of a MARTA stop, the Belt Line, a huge urban renewal project on an old rail line, and a big park. One Vision house I hit was abandoned across the street from a home so recently redone that the squares of newly laid lawn were still visible from the planting. Dumpsters were dotted here and there.
I hit one Vision property on my list that looked abandoned on its hillside double lot. As I was parking a man was opening a padlock on the door, but he turned out not to be the owner. He was a burgeoning landlord who had just closed on the house. He had bought it from New Western Investment which had bought a package of homes from Vision. He was originally from Rwanda but in the country for many decades and had just gone into real estate full time over the last year with 20 properties now. His plan was fix and flip. He pointed down the hill to the neighborhood I had just left, as already having gone past the tipping point of his price range from gentrification pressure, but he was betting on this area to be next.
The census track says this area is 89% African-American and has stayed that way even as home evaluations have leaped forward by several factors in recent years. I was navigating streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, the Atlanta-based SCLC civil rights icons.
No matter what the color, the gentrification class is the same. Families our teams were seeing in the far reaches of Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton had roots on the blocks I was walking now, but the time even under a rent-to-own contract that they could imagine owning a house here was fading fast.
