The foreclosure on my block
It's an odd looking house hard by the railroad tracks on Marion Street in Natick. Built in 1930 with no particular style in mind, it sits precariously perched on the downside of a steep hill, with no front yard and a parking-space/driveway the only buffer between the house and a busy cut-through road.
But it's a sad commentary on the Greater Boston real estate market that this clearly dysfunctional house, crammed onto a tiny lot by some Depression-era builder, looked slightly tempting to my wife Karen and me when we were house hunting back in 2002.
How things have changed. Today I thank my lucky stars I never bought it, the plywood over the front window at 17 Marion St. the telltale sign the never-ending foreclosure epidemic has claimed another home.
But back when we were trying to buy our first house, the $250,000 price-tag, if nothing else, seemed tempting. No, talk of a real estate bubble was still a couple years away, but prices were already escalating fast.
Karen and I ended up spending $280,000 to buy a house a little farther up Marion Street, a run-down classic fixer-upper, yes, but with some inherent charm and far enough from the tracks not to awake with every passing freight train.
I soon lost track of the house down the street - another couple later bought it and appeared to do some work fixing it up.
But at some point cars stopped parking in the driveway and the couple who bought it did a disappearing act.
I looked up the real estate records on the house this morning - it turns out 17 Marion was foreclosed on back in late 2009. (Here's a half decent picture.)
There were some attempts by the bank after that to market it as a "starter home," but let's face it, without the pressure of a rising market, there's little hope of anyone buying this turkey. Instead of lowering the price, the bank raised it to $269,000 - brilliant move given the results.
Yes, it's a turkey fit for some naive first-time buyer. I'm just glad that I wasn't the one who made the mistake of buying it.
