10 tips to protect your empty, for-sale home
One Orlando homeowner came home to a missing driveway and a $10K bill
Shortly before closing on my condo purchase, my real estate lawyer insisted that I read the bylaws — the entire 103-page document — and then move on to the Rules & Regulations. No matter how much I dodged it, she just kept on nagging me to read them. Finally, I sat down to do so, and I found a few curious rules. One that made me raise an eyebrow was banning “for sale” signs in the front yard. It seemed like a ridiculous ban. One of the best ways to sell a home is to let locals walking by know it’s for sale. Why would you tell a unit owner that “for sale” signs are a no-go?
Recommended Read: “If you read nothing else in your bylaws … Make sure you read 10 things from condominium bylaws before buying property”
In the first couple of years when I wasn’t on the condo board, I never saw yard signs (not even for landlords) but still didn’t really get the logic. It wasn’t until I became a condo board president that I really started understanding why this rule was in place.
First, I became the grumpy gardener who knew it was going to leave a hole in the yard until the home was sold. Second, I realized how much of a nuisance the yard sign was when a garden hose and sprinklers kept getting tangled around it. Third, our association spent a considerable amount of money on soil to get rid of an alarming dip in the middle of the yard, a liability lawsuit just waiting to happen. Now here’s this new (much smaller) hole we’d have to fill!
Because of these three instances, within hours of seeing a condo owner’s Realtor shove a sign in the front yard (without permission), I yanked it up and patted the soil back into place. I thought the topic was closed.
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Weeks later, I was getting ready to walk my dog and glanced near one back doorway to find a homeless man with a cart, a sleeping bag and a bunch of garbage bags. He was comfortably napping near another unit where one tenant was constantly going out of town. All it would take is one long vacation for her, and our condo could’ve had a squatter on our hands. The guy woke up to see my extremely unhappy dog and a frowning black woman (me) standing over him.
“When this dog walk is over, I need you to be gone,” I said to him.
I didn’t wait for a reply. I short-leashed my dog, who clearly had more to say, and went about my regular walking route. To my relief, he’d packed his things up and scurried to a nearby corner — to continue sleeping on curbside grass. I never did see him anymore after that, but it was a learning experience. Empty homes (or even condo units) bring a startling amount of attention. And people can be very bold with letting you know that they know your home is empty. It’s why I understand the jail gates on the back door of my home before I bought it.
Recommended Read: “People in glass houses shouldn't need gated windows ~ From squatters to break-ins, anything can happen when you don't check on a home”
Recently, I thought about the nuisance of trying to sell an empty home while reading about what happened to Floridian homeowner Amanda Brochu. While she was in the middle of selling one home and just bought another home, her listing agent made a point of highlighting how potential buyers didn’t have to worry about HOAs or a fenced-in backyard. Apparently, that was all it took to get certain people’s attention — the wrong people — on the home being sold.
Five different contractors showed up within a matter of days and started measuring her driveway. WFTV reports that when she confronted one contractor, she was told that a man named “Andre” reached out to him to ask about a driveway replacement quote. The story goes that Andre claimed to be the landlord. The phone number for Andre ended up being the phone number to Orlando airport, according to Fox 59.
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But the “contractor,” knowing full well that Andre couldn’t meet him to drop off the $7,200 deposit, still moved forward with the job. (Note: This is when bells started ringing in my head because I know full well as a board member that once you start talking about thousands of dollars, contractors won’t touch one sidewalk panel without receiving a down payment.)
That next week, and while the homeowner was preparing to go out of town, she got an Amazon Ring alert on her smartphone. On the screen, she saw a bulldozer tearing out the concrete slab of her driveway and hauling it away. And while I was stunned by the site of her destroyed driveway, a contractor named Jeff explained how common a scam like this is. It turns out that all it takes is writing a larger check and asking for a refund on the “repairs” later on.
Recommended Read: “98% of check writing scams are reported by young people ~ Black people wrote less than 30% of checks in the past 30 days”
So what could this homeowner have done differently to both sell her home and avoid scammers?