Sweet Home Dreams ... Made In Detroit?
DETROIT (WWJ) - Prospective home buyers -- take notice!
"Open House" signs will be out on Sunday between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. in one east side Detroit neighborhood -- as the city's Land Bank begins showcasing 15 vacant homes set to go up for public auction.
Alexis Wiley, press secretary for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, says that 500 people are already registered or the open house and more than 3,000 biders registered on the website. She believes that the houses will probably sell higher than opening bid.
"The opening bid for all houses is one thousand dollars, but of course, when you look at houses like this, I'm pretty sure that they're going to go for higher than that," said Wiley.
Wiley says interested buyers of the properties in Detroit's East English Village neighborhood, near I-94 and Cadieux can not simply "buy and hold".
"This auction says that if you buy a house, you agree to bring the house up to code and move someone into the house within 180 days. So what we've seen in the past, where people have been able to buy houses and just sit on them, that's not gonna happen here," said Wiley.
LaTisha Johnson is with the East English Neighborhood Association, "it would be a pie in the sky for someone to come into this neighborhood and to get a house for a thousand dollars."
It's a common story — many of the houses for auction on the new buildingdetroit.org website are lacking essentials, probably due to scrappers. The site warns that most houses will require more money
in improvements than the cost of the home itself, also cautioning that "failure of property to bring a property up to code within six months will result in forfeiture."
See all the listings HERE. Bidding happens only online; see the complete rules of bidding HERE.
The city said Monday that one home will be auctioned each day on the land bank site beginning May 5.
