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When Paul Gabrail and two partners snag a foreclosed home on the cheap, neighbors have good reason to cheer.
"We do brand-new everything: new roofs, new windows, new kitchens, new bathrooms, new plumbing," he said. "We put granite in some of the properties. These are areas that have probably never seen granite tops."
The partners of ADP Properties target Cleveland's inner-ring suburbs, which were hit hard by the subprime crisis.
Call these investors anti-flippers. Instead of buying homes to sell fast at a profit — as flippers did in the boom — they buy, hold and upgrade, improving blighted neighborhoods. Not dependent on ever-rising prices, they plan to ride out any value setbacks from future foreclosures.
Many homes along Cleveland streets have been boarded up and taken back by banks. Prices are down as much as 85% from the boom.
Pooling their cash, Gabrail's trio has bought nearly 60 homes since last March, at an average $12,000 to $13,000. Counting rehabs, the final tally reaches $35,000 to $40,000.
"Neighbors stop by and say, 'We love what you're doing to the place,'" Gabrail said.
Money By The Month
Gabrail, 28, and his young partners — Andrew Strigle and former Cleveland Browns tight end Darnell Sanders — have had no trouble finding renters to pony up more than $900 a month, giving them yearly returns of 14% to 16%.
The rental pool is full of ex-homeowners whose subprime mortgages escalated beyond their means, causing them to walk away or go through foreclosure. Most don't have the cash to buy and renovate even the most steeply discounted homes.
"We have a good leasing guy, and we really believe we have a very good product and that helps," Gabrail said. Tenants include cooks, nursing aides and students.
Anti-flippers are targeting some of the worst-hit markets, such as Cleveland, Detroit and Atlanta's West End district, the top U.S. ZIP code for bank fraud. There, ghost buyers used phony Social Security numbers and other means to get mortgages, never intending to make a payment.
Investors started eating away at Atlanta's bank-owned housing stock late last year, including the notorious West End ZIP code of 30310, says Scott Askew, owner of Fourteen West Realtors in Atlanta.
"Investors are the first ones into the market when it first starts to heal, and then they are followed by others," he said.
Though prices have risen in recent months in Detroit, Cleveland, Atlanta and other troubled markets, they're still far below their peak values, and still lower than pre-boom days. So investor-buyers are in no hurry to sell, until they can profit. Meantime, they enjoy rental income, with returns often topping 10%.
"If in five years we can sell, great," Gabrail said. "If we have to hold them for 15 years, great."
Buyer interest in Detroit and Cleveland is rising, says Ken Shuman, spokesman for real estate search engine Trulia.com. He says Detroit was the 36th most-searched city last month vs. 45th a year earlier. Cleveland went from No. 246 in 2009 to No. 160. Atlanta inched up to 15th place from 17th.
"Search behavior is the crystal ball for us. It gives us an idea where markets are heating up," Shuman said.
The boom-bust California markets of Riverside, Stockton and Corona are much less searched this year vs. a year ago, he says. The same goes for Fort Myers and Lehigh Acres in Florida, suggesting "a lot of vultures have already handpicked over them and have moved on to other places."
In deeply discounted Detroit, brokers are working with investors from as far away as Australia.
Buyers are snapping up three-bedroom bungalows for between $2,000 (less than a car, some Motor City observers point out) and $70,000, depending on the area.
"The rental market in Detroit is exploding" with demand due to foreclosures, said Real Estate Dreams broker Mervet Barakat. "Investors are buying one or two homes."
An Aussie group buys 20 to 25 homes a month, capped at $50,000 each with renovations, says Tony Raffin, owner of ReMax Associates in St. Clair Shores, north of Detroit.
One local client spent $8,000 for a home, then $10,000 on hardwood floors and a new kitchen. Across from a hospital and near posh Grosse Pointe, it quickly rented for $1,000 a month.
"Where are you going to make $1,000 a month on $18,000?" Raffin asked.
The jobless rate remains stubbornly high, "but you still have people who are responsible and pay their bills," Gabrail said.
Strength In Numbers
With investor interest picking up, home values have been rising in many hard-hit markets.
Cleveland home prices fell as much as 76% from the winter 2005-06 market peak to the trough last spring, Clear Capital data show. But in the four months ended Feb. 22, they were up 1.8% vs. a year earlier. In Detroit, home prices rose 4.7% and in Atlanta, 2.4%.
A new foreclosure wave would suit buy-and-hold investors just fine. After all, competition for bargains has been intensifying.
"We'll have more opportunities to get good houses," Gabrail said.
