Housing Bubble Horror Stories

JPMorgan Chase Accidentally Breaks Into Your House And Steals Everything You Own

'Bobo and Joy Dickson bought a house had been headed for foreclosure, but JPMorgan Chase apparently didn't get the message that the former owners had moved out and the new owners were in residence. So, naturally, they hired a firm to drill the Dickson's locks and take everything they owned, including their food. Now JPMorgan Chase is "taking it seriously."

"We take this very seriously, and we are working with EMC [a mortgage company JPMorgan Chase owns] and the family's attorney to make this right," said Tom Kelly, a JPMorgan spokesman.

After the Dickson's bought the house back in May, the foreclosure proceedings were supposed to have been stopped. They weren't. That's when the former owner's mortgage company (owned by JPMorgan Chase) hired "Field Asset Services Inc." to drill the locks and "empty the house," according to the Austin American-Statesmen. Field Asset Services claims that the Dickson's possessions were given to area thrift stores, but they have been unable to locate them.

Ordinarily, when personal possessions are left in a foreclosed home a court order is needed to remove the items and the owners are given the opportunity to reclaim them within 24 hours. JPMorgan Chase says its not sure if there was a court order in this case.'

Evicted!

Haven't seen that in a while since most of the buildings in my hood turned condo.

Thank you Housing Bubble!

Thanks to the interest rate adjustment by the Feds, my monthly mortgage payment just dropped almost $200!

Yay!

Brick House

[Click image to enlarge]

When Denver was still a lawless cowboy/mining town full of trouble, it was constantly catching fire and burning down.

Eventually, they passed a law that any new buildings were required to be built in brick.

In the 60's and 70's, much of downtown was razed for shiny new glass and metal boxes [bad idea].

The area now known as LoDo, was pretty much a hobo-wasteland with abandoned buildings and rail cars.

But thanks to urban redevelopment, it is now yuppie central - home to some of the most expensive real estate in Denver.

F*ck!!

I have heard nothing but bad things about Bank of America.

Bank of America to acquire Countrywide

What housing bubble?

My interest rate and payment went down on my second mortgage.

Yay!

Groovy

What mortgage bubble?

I have been paying an extra $50 a month on my mortgage, which gets applied directly to principal, and I crunched the numbers today, and realized I have decreased the principle by 3k.

I hope the fed drops interest rates again, because my payment would go down again.

Update: Yay! The dropped the prime rate.

Although, I think I would keep paying the same amount so that a larger sum each month knocks the principal down.

I wish I would have bought earlier instead of wasting all that money on rent.

I'm just glad I didn't over purchase like all those people getting screwed by the sub-prime meltdown.

Would you buy a 'haunted' house?

Ghosts may not spook home buyers

Sites of murders or suicides often sit on the market, but reports of friendly apparitions don't seem to scare some people.

'Oh, no, not the attic. Anywhere but the attic. But the visitors insisted on going in.

The house's owner reluctantly opened the attic door and stepped aside as her two visitors trod into the gloomy room.

"All I know is we walked into the attic with her, and it's cavernous, and we were just looking hard, and, I don't know, this feeling came over me -- this warm feeling," Craig Schaible says. "I looked at my wife and she felt it, too."

Craig and Yvonne Schaible were thinking of buying this 111-year-old Victorian house on a tree-shaded street in Fanwood, N.J. The owner had grown up in the house and was trying to sell it now that her parents had died. But an uncanny presence threatened to scare away buyers and drive down the house's value. The owner had not yet told the Schaibles about the mysterious sounds and frightful sights that unnerved her -- and terrified her husband.

"We were walking out of the attic," Schaible says, "and my wife said, 'Any ghosts?' And the lady said, 'Well, yeah.' We were like, 'Cool, tell us about it.'"

The owner didn't go into much detail. She said people had seen and heard things over the years. "We said we kind of think of it as a positive thing," Schaible says. The Schaibles decided then and there to buy the eight-bedroom house, a fixer-upper built in 1890. They paid the asking price.

Ghosts can add value

If you think ghost stories make a house less valuable, you might be right -- most of the time. But not all the time. The Schaibles weren't your typical house buyers. They were living in a two-bedroom town house and were looking for a big, old Victorian house to restore. As soon as they stepped through the pair of 8-foot-high front doors, they knew this house was the one. Furthermore, the Schaibles are famous among their friends for elaborate Halloween bashes they hold every other year, complete with caskets in the rooms and a hand sticking out of the punch bowl.

The ghost stories about the house "made it completely more valuable," Schaible says. "Would I pay more money for a haunted house? No. The decision to buy the house was based on the house itself." But, he adds, the spectral tales "juiced it up. The fact that the Halloween people bought a haunted house was so funny -- too perfect."

Six weeks elapsed from the time the Schaibles made an offer until possession. During that time in spring 2001, the seller's husband stayed behind to ease the transfer of ownership. The Schaibles loosened his tongue with a few beers one night, and the man told them about apparitions he had seen and described a time when he heard his wife calling from the basement. He went downstairs, but no one was there. Then he heard a disembodied voice chuckling in his ear. "According to him and his wife, this thing was picking on him," Schaible says.

"I'm skeptical," Schaible says. "I'm not saying I necessarily believed it. Everyone has their perception of things."

Then the Schaibles moved in.

The second night, it became clear that "there was something in the house that wanted to make itself known to me," Schaible says.

They were moving in, and stuff was all over the place, including a Civil War rifle that was resting against a wall in a 12-foot-wide hallway. In the middle of the night, Schaible got up, "and this very heavy rifle launched across the hall and landed at my feet." It flew about eight feet, he estimates. He looked for loose floorboards or anything else that could have caused the mysterious occurrence, but he couldn't find an explanation.

So Schaible went downstairs into the kitchen and delivered a spirited monologue. "I said, 'Hey, I live here, I pay the mortgage, and I don't need this scaring me out of my mind in the middle of the night.' I ranted for about an hour or so and sat around for a while."

After that, the Schaibles occasionally heard voices and glimpsed figures, but there were no scares in the middle of the night. Incidents have become less frequent as restoration work has progressed.

Cindy Neivert, the real-estate agent with Burgdorff ERA who brought the house to the Schaibles' attention, says the presence of "ghosties" can add to or detract from a home's value. It depends on the buyer and what the house will be used for. Someone who wants to convert a big house into a bed-and-breakfast inn might see marketing value in ghost stories, as long as they're not too scary. Adventurous buyers such as the Schaibles might not be spooked. But ghost stories might scare away the squeamish.

Neivert is kind of glad that the owner told the Schaibles about the haunting because she wasn't sure if she would have been required to disclose it. "I know you have to disclose if someone was murdered in a house," she says. "As far as a poltergeist or a ghosty, I don't really know."'

All of this can be yours.....

for $419 thousand dollars!

Good luck selling that house now.

Real estate agent finds dead body while showing home

'MORRISON – During a routine house showing Monday, an area real estate agent found a dead body near a home as potential buyers toured the grounds.

The Jefferson County Sheriff's Department says at around 4 p.m. Monday they received a phone call from the agent who said the body of a dead man had been found. The agent said the body was on the ground near the home located in the 8400 block of Scenic Drive.

Sheriff's deputies responded and determined that the body had been at the home for some period of time.

They do not have an identity of the man but described the victim as an adult male between 5 feet 8 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall with a medium build and a long black ponytail. The victim was wearing new blue jeans and a grey t-shirt with the word 'DECA' on the left breast. He also had on brown work shoes.

The coroner is now working with the Sheriff's office to determine the cause of death and the identity of the man.

Anyone with information is urged to call the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office tip line at 303-271-5612.'

Roommate From hell

I would hate to have bought a loft...

and have my view be of homeless people waiting to get in to the shelter.

20 years to a better Denver

Today In - 'Mountain Lions'

Mountain lion killed by wildlife officials

'BOULDER – A mountain lion, which had been deemed a "nuisance cat" by wildlife officials was shot and killed on Thursday.

Division of Wildlife officials say for the past three days, the mountain lion had been reportedly in the Pinebrook Hills subdivision within the city limits.

"We had a problem up there," said Jennifer Churchill, a spokeswoman for the Division of Wildlife.

Churchill says the mountain lion had been aggressively taking pets from people's yards and had clearly become far too comfortable around people.

In one instance, a woman went to let her dog out and realized the lion was not only in her yard, but was at her back porch, according to Churchill. The woman saw the mountain lion and did not let her dog out.

Churchill says the male cat weighed an estimated 100 pounds. His body will be sent to Fort Collins for a necropsy.'

Perils Of Property Ownership - Part 3 - 'Whew!'

I took the day off in order to get the plumbing/leak issue resolved. Luckily, John, the plumber, confirmed that everything was dry as a bone, and whatever caused the leak, was gone.

Although I don't really think it was the bits of missing grout, the plumber said that could have caused it. Thank god I am kinda handy, and re-grouted the tiles as soon as I found out.

Also luckily enough, my downstairs neighbor was ok with his assessment and said she would let me know if any problems arise. She also rescinded my offer to pay for supplies to repaint her ceiling.

So in the end, it all worked out. Althought, John, the plumber, did point out that I have a problem with my 'P Trap' [no comments from the peanut gallery!], and I should swap it at sooner before later.

Along with finishing up touching up the grout, I am going to tackle that this weekend. Thankfully it's a three day weekend. Which helps, because I am also on deadline for the magazine.

By the way, I have to recommend Bell Plumbing and Heating. I used them before, and even though they are a little pricey [the inspection cost me $127], their plumbers know their craft, and don't create false problems in order to pad more money.

'Drug' says it all.

East Colfax here in East Denver/Saudi Aurora, is an infamous stretch of neighborhood known for its prostitutes, and by-the-hour motels. Westword has an interesting article this week on how gentrification is making even more people homeless.

The area wasn't that bad when I was a kid. I used to live a few blocks north between Colfax, and then Stapleton Airport.

But eventually, in '86 due to my bro getting in to trouble in school, my mom decided to sell the house and move. Problem was, she closed on our old place before the deal went through on the new place.

Then after that deal fell through, we actually hotel-surfed like the people in the story. We even stayed at the Sands hotel for a few weeks, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds like it got.

So, that was my summer/fall of '86.

Who knew ten years later, through a series of events, I would be homeless again, and sofa surfing.

You know, when I get down on things going on in my life these days, I need to remember how good I actually got it.

'Amy Limon was born near Trinidad in 1941, the fourth child of an eventual eleven born to her Apache family. She was ten when her two older brothers were drafted to fight in Korea and her older sister married off at fifteen, bumping Amy up to the woman of the house, caretaker for her younger siblings and alcoholic parents. Amy was epileptic, but that didn't slow her down. In addition to taking care of the household, she started washing dishes at bars and restaurants after school and on the weekends.

She was still in high school when her drunk father made a move on her, showing her his penis. Her mother refused to believe her, but her sisters confirmed that he'd tried the same thing on them -- only they'd been too scared to speak up. Amy wasn't scared, though. She's not afraid of anyone, she says, so she reported her father to the authorities, and he bounced between a state mental facility in Pueblo and prison. While he was locked up, Amy married a man who was in the Air Force.

When her father was released, in 1959, Amy followed her husband to Denver, where he was stationed at Lowry. Afraid they'd be lost without her, Amy's mother and her seven younger siblings all piled into the car and moved to Denver, too.

Amy and her husband had four children -- one a daughter who lived only three months. By 1973, they had fallen out of love and divorced. Amy moved to an apartment with the children. She found work in a halfway house, taking care of people on their way out of mental institutions. She didn't love the work; taking care of people was all she'd ever done, and she was getting sick of it. But at work she found love: another Air Force man of Mexican-American descent who'd served four years in Vietnam and was one of the facility's residents.

Julian Limon had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was bipolar, but he was always friendly with Amy. When he was released from the halfway house, he married her and moved into her apartment in Westminster, where they lived happily until Julian went off his meds one day in 1986 and was sent back to the institution. No longer able to afford the apartment on her own, Amy went to a women's shelter in Denver. A few weeks later she moved into Halcyon House, a subsidized apartment on Arapahoe Street, where she was still living alone when she had a stroke ten years ago. The stroke put Amy in a wheelchair. But by then her husband's condition had improved enough that his doctors allowed him a conditional leave so that he could live with her and take care of her. Her son helped, too, but five years ago he was killed in a gang shooting, an innocent bystander.

By last October, Amy's husband "started acting his bullshit again," and she knew he was off his meds. She woke one morning unable to find her wheelchair. She called for her husband but got no reply. He'd taken her chair cruising and left Amy stuck in bed. So she started sleeping in her chair. Then Julian had another episode, beating on the walls and making a mess of the place. Halcyon House managers told Amy that if she wanted to stay there, her husband could never come back. "But what if God makes my husband well again?" she asked.'

Ha

'At the end of M. Night Shyamalan's open house, prospective home-buyers discover that the mansion isn't actually for sale. (The clues, of course, were right in front of their eyes the whole time.)'

Defamer

Perils Of Property Ownership - Part 2

So I got a better look at the crawlspace last night.

I didn't see any dampness anywhere.

Only a section where I once took a shower, and didn't realize the curtain wasn't completely closed.

So I showed it to the downstairs neighbor, and now she's all freaked out that there is mold on that section.

Plus, I found out that instead of a big wet stain in her ceiling - she says just a small section of paint bulged out.

I asked he if she punctured it to see if there was water in there, and she said no because she's afraid of mold.

This is irritating because Denver is pretty much a desert and mold isn't really abundant here.

Plus the way the building is built, you could feel air circulating through the crawlspace.

I just hope she doesn't be a beeyotch and demand that mold cleaning people come in and fix it.