Want to pay less for real estate? Look for a place where someone died.
Myles Ma of Policy Genius has written an engaging piece called “How death can haunt (or help) your house hunt.” According to one of his sources, you can expect a 10 to 25 percent discount a house where someone died.
Morbid? Yeah, a little. That is, if you can actually find out what happened there. In 32 states you don’t have to disclose such information; in 15, you have to disclose if the buyer asks. The toughest laws are in California (death within past three years) and South Dakota and Alaska (one year prior).
It doesn’t have to be murder, incidentally. Some people just want to know if a person breathed his last in a place they’re thinking of buying.
One of the most geekily fascinating parts of the article has to do with the so-called “Murder House” – a Los Angeles manse where a season of the television program “American Horror Story” was filmed. The folks who bought the place are suing the realtors for allegedly not telling them that some creepy fans of that very creepy TV show known to, um, haunt the place. Some of them sleep just outside the property line and others have frequently trespassed to the point of actually trying to get into the house. Yikes.
The article also cites one of the best website names ever: DiedInHouse.com.
Giveaways for you
Savings.com is giving away five $100 e-gift cards to Home Depot. The thrust of the giveaway is something called #HomeDepotDecor, i.e., the fact that Home Depot is now selling a ton of furniture (including beds), furnishings and even linens. Who knew? However, the gift card is yours to spend as you wish. Deadline to enter is 11:59 p.m. PST Wednesday, Nov. 4.
Zatoru is giving away a whopping . If I can’t win it, I hope you can. The giveaway ends Nov. 7.
I’m giving away a $25 gift card of the winner’s choice. You have until 6 p.m. PST Saturday (Nov. 7) to enter to win.
Or maybe you’ll win the Playstation 5 gaming system in this giveaway from Sweeps. Don’t like gaming? Take the alternate prize: $500 cash. The giveaway ends 11:59 p.m. PSDT Sunday, Nov. 8.
Just Start Investing is giving away $50 worth of Target scrip. This giveaway also ends Sunday, Nov. 8, at 11:45 p.m. UTC (aka “Greenwich Mean Time”).
Other people’s money
In her latest for the Associated Press, Liz Weston tackles the twin devils of consumption and competition. The title, “Stop counting other people’s money,” says it all: You don’t know what their true circumstances are like. Specifically, you don’t know whether they were born with money, are earning a ton in their jobs or, maybe, whether they’re up to their hairlines in debt.
Why do we care what other people have? Well, because we feel the push to do as well as others – or at least to look as though we are. The pressure is much keener if you have kids who want to know why their family doesn’t take ski vacations over winter break, or why their grandparents aren’t going to pay for their college educations.
Again, though, you don’t know the whole story. Maybe those who glitter when they walk* also lie awake at night wondering how to keep that house of (credit) cards from collapsing. Or maybe they had the good fortune to be born rich, or at least be born under the right conditions to make success not only possible, but pretty much inevitable.
You’d do well to pay attention to your own bottom line than to envy other people theirs. Decide what’s important to you and work to become secure enough with your own values that you don’t much care what everyone else has.
Readers: Ever find yourself counting other people’s money? If so, what tactic(s) did you use to get past that all-too-human impulse?
*And one hopes they do better than Richard Cory did.
DS and DIL bought their first home last year from the estate of the owner who expired of natural causes in an upstairs bedroom. (I’ve stayed in that bedroom and can attest to no haunting.) The death was disclosed as soon as they asked. They negotiated a very substantial discount.
Good for them. Not so good for the seller, I guess…It would be like having a nice house that’s worth money until the lutefisk factory opens up a block away.
Ha ha ha! As a Swede who grew up smelling the lutefisk boiling on Christmas Eve, I know of what you speak! Thanks for the chuckle.
When we were looking to buy a rental house we googled all street addresses. We found one that sheltered a drug dealer who assaulted a child. We loved the house, but couldn’t risk buying a house that could have be used to cook meth. When you read the warnings about the residue the chemicals leave it is scary. The clean up cost as much as the house.
I hadn’t even thought about meth labs! That’s a good point.
One result of the pandemic is more people may choose to live out their lives at home rather than go a nursing home, assisted living facility, or somewhere like that.
As more homes gain a history of someone dying in them, the associated discount may decline.
It’s not just a death in the house that can make it really bad. As the buyer,or potential buyer, you have to do due diligence. I once looked at a house I was thinking of buying. I looked it up on the internet. Good thing: its former owner had once worked for Planned Parenthood. When I googled the address, it appears that a rabid, possibly violent, Right to Life fanatic had put the photo of the house along with the address on the internet and was urging others to do bad things/terrorize to the woman who had lived there. He sounded very irrational, to say the least. Problem is, I am also a single woman and chances are they might have mistaken me for the person they were angry at. Never mind the fact I have nothing to do with that issue and wouldn’t know the former owner from Adam, but I could have been targeted for vandalism or a hate crime of some sort. (Egging the house? Breaking windows? Drive by shooting? Who knows!) So I dropped that house from my list of potential homes. Better safe than sorry.
Wow.
Ooh, I have a couple of these stories.
I own a rental house in a Senior Community. I had a great tenant who I really loved. He knew when they moved in that he was terminally ill. He wanted to get his wife situated comfortably before he died. Life is full of quirks. She died within the year and he lived for nine more years.
During the Great Recession, I got into the habit of calling him when I made the mortgage payment, so he wouldn’t worry about being greeted by the Sheriff with an eviction notice.
One day, he called and said he really liked living in the house, but was worried that it would be problematic for me if he died there. OMG, I prayed for the right words, and they came! I told him that since this was a Senior Community, dying at home in one’s own bed was kind of the Gold Standard. I told him I wasn’t ready to lose him yet, and that I would love it if he stayed until his very last day. That’s exactly what happened, many months later. RIP, Jack Saunders. You were a helluva guy.
I have disclosed this to every potential tenant and, as hoped, it has never been a problem. In fact, DH and I hope to live in the house ourselves one day. I think Jack would be pleased.
There is a difference between someone dying of natural causes at a ripe old age and a house where a murder is committed. And that’s my second story.
MY BIL was the executor of a tragic estate. After sending their only child off to college, the wife (a old friend of BIL’s from high school) asked her husband for a divorce. The distraught husband killed her with a shotgun inside the house, then asphyxiated himself in the garage. It was left to my BIL to settle their estate. The story made headlines, so the house’s past was widely known. Once the house was cleaned up and emptied out, it went on the market with full disclosure. They asked about 10% less than the area comps and got it quickly. The buyer was a single woman, which was kind of surprising.
I guess the answer is that it depends on the circumstances. In a hot market, it has less impact than you’d expect.