STEVE SCHMITZ surveys the street outside his newly bought four-bedroom house and enthuses over what he sees. Stucco houses with tidy gardens, just like his, line the road. A minivan is parked outside one, an SUV sits in the driveway of another. An elementary school is just a few blocks away. It is as idyllic as a new homeowner could wish in this western suburb of Phoenix.
Mr Schmitz, however, is no ordinary homeowner. The house is just one of more than 1,000 which his company, American Residential Properties, has acquired since 2008 in Phoenix, Las Vegas and California. ARP bought the house for roughly half its peak selling price of more than $300,000 in a “short sale”: in essence, a sale forced on the owner to avoid foreclosure. After carpet cleaning and repainting it was quickly rented for $1,300 a month, about half what the original owner had been paying for a mortgage.
Read more...The housing market: Pulling its weight at last | The Economist
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