[NOTE: Tenants and home owners should be warned that real estate “investors” may attempt to meet and compel sales or manipulate “reluctant” sellers by responding to ads to rent rooms in shared homes and perhaps even to rent houses. This blog reposts a message written to a Facebook housing group about a contact from an applicant who turned out to be associated with an “investor” coaching group that is involved with “wholesaling” houses. In this case, the aspiring investor also appeared to be involved with a sewer and drain line service. This is of note since, in my unfortunate experience, these low-pressure lines that can be accessed from next door and nearby are a primary focus of the early morning mobbing attacks that are intended to sabotage utilities, degrade interior environments, and compel residents to flee.]
This morning I received mail from roomies.com, telling me that someone I’d communicated with on the site had been thrown off of it, and that they wanted to let me know to ensure the site was safe. Just above that email, was one from the offender, asking the question that I don’t bother responding to anymore: “Is this still available?” It’s been clear for a while that people who write and say nothing about themselves may have other interests besides sharing a house.
A bit later, I checked FB, like roomies.com, a site I reluctantly returned to and began using in hopes of finding roommates for the house I’ve wanted to share in Albany, California. I began using FB and roomies because my ads on CL have been tagged within hours, sometimes minutes, of posting. Another home owner on this or another FB group I’m on has been having the same experience. When I checked FB, there was a message from someone of the same name as the person who’d been ejected from roomies.com, which was suspicious since I don’t link between these two sites. His FB profile provided more information.
The respondent to my ad described himself as a “real estate investor.” A link went to SUBTO (https://www.subto.com), a site claiming to teach people how to “creatively finance” property investments. In a video on the SUBTO site, one of the presumed coaches says that while he doesn’t say so, he is a [real estate] “wholesaler.” A primary strategy on SUBTO is to teach “investors” how to promise to pay the home owner’s mortgage, for example, without legal assumption of the debt, in exchange for the deed.
It’s not the first time I’ve had people in real estate responding to my ads, either as a tenant or a home owner. But having been victimized by neighborhood watch/block coordinators working with contractors and real estate “investors” in Seattle, Washington and in Albany, California, and having learned that someone who is involved in the problems I’ve been having in Albany, California appears to be an employee of the Oakland-based aggregator of “single-family rentals” called Roofstock.com. I check people before I respond, as best I can, and I am quite willing to turn down people who call themselves real estate “investors” — that’s not a reasonable fit for a co-operative home, and perhaps not for any single-family home that is not a candidate for gentrification, aggregation, or being priced out of any remotely affordable range.
As I’ve unfortunately had to learn these last years, neighborhood watch and block coordinators in my neighborhood and yours may be more interested in turning over your home than in safeguarding your person and property. When you’re thinking of reforming the police, you should be getting rid of the block watch. These groups attract extremists, they are exclusionary, and they are not there to represent their neighborhoods. Given their willingness to make false reports to police on those whose houses they want to turn over, I would not be surprised if some of them were willing to use ICE to force residents out of homes they want to turn over to speculators. It’s that bad.
I’m writing this to try and warn other women, others who live alone, others who are older or might not have the politics that some conservative neighborhood watch and block coordinators want in their neighborhoods. Because when you have people who go out of their way to get into your house to make you make a deal, it’s a volatile situation. When those who are tasked with safety and disaster preparation in your neighborhood collude with “investors” to force you out of your home, the civil rights violations are egregious. I’ve already been living in a bullying situation for years, because the way these speculators work seems to be by moving in around their victims and tricking them or harassing them out of their houses. It’s a predatory scam that is constructed to have a “civil” veneer in cities, like Albany, California, that care more about collecting property transfer taxes than about sabotage of utilities and women being attacked and essentially battered in their beds and in their homes. If you look at the City of Albany website, you might see the statement “Albany Cares.” I can tell you, categorically, this is not true. What I have had to live through in Albany and in Seattle should be a scandal.
As I continue to hold my home and continue to hope to move it towards being a co-op or land trust, I must take great care. When speculators and investors get “creative” and try to move into rented homes, whether to encourage the landlord to cut a deal with them or to create enough havoc so that a landlord blames renters in general and decides to sell, it creates an unsafe situation for all those who live in the house. We are being exposed to dangerous situations because of predatory practices in real estate that are being ignored instead of prosecuted.
Please take care. When a woman living alone is attacked by neighbors on three sides, it is not a property dispute. It is not civil.
