AJC: For less than the price of a decent used car, you can buy a home in Atlanta today.

[El Pinko]

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/printedition/2008/05/12/assess.html

Tax assessors boggled by housing dip

By D.L. Bennett
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/12/08
For less than the price of a decent used car, you can buy a home in Atlanta today. Actually, real estate agents list a dozen choices for $10,000 or less. Step up in price to $20,000 and your choices expand 10 fold.

The prices seem absurd but they are part of a real estate market suffering with rampant foreclosures, mortgage fraud, abandoned investor properties, a collapsing mortgage industry and other ills. The market is unlike anything seen in metro Atlanta in years and it has local tax assessors and appraisers as confused as anyone.

What is the value of a lot if no one can get a loan to buy it? How should you value a home that sits on the market for a year with no offers? When a neighborhood has several foreclosures, short sales and abandoned properties, do they set the market?

The training and rules for mass appraisal say taxable values should be set at fair market value or at the price for a sale between a "willing buyer and willing seller." Distressed sales, foreclosures and short sales are not supposed to count toward setting taxable values

[TahitiNut]

1. Same in Detroit.

:shrug:

[enid602]

4. trend

Same in Phila., Balto., Harrisburg, Cleveland and so many other cities. When will people wake up and see the trend?

[pa28]

2. Or Flint!

You could buy five houses for the price of one Chevy Malibu.

[rove karl rove]

3. aftershock

via the mortagage banking industry. Of course, this is hardest on urban Amwerica.

[MetaTrope]

5. Ah, if only Chicago were there

A condo in a crime-ridden neighborhood will still set you back over a quarter-million dollars...

[M0rpheus]

10. Did someone say uptown?

:hi:

[RebelOne]

6. I don't know where these cheap homes are, but I wouldn't doubt

that they are in high crime areas. I live just northwest of Atlanta and the average prices of new homes here are in the neighborhood of $300,000.

[Dogtown]

7. Agreed, R1

This is sensationalist journalism. These houses must be the absolute least attractive buildings that can be called a "house", in the most depressed neighborhoods.

$300,000 seems to be asking in Cherokee County for a reasonable family dwelling.

[reformedrethug]

8. The only way

you can buy a house for the price of a used car where I am looking is if that used car is a Rolls or Lambo!!

[lonestarnot]

9. Damn.