As building season begins, vacant homes linger

SUSSEX COUNTY — Rain-soaked newspapers wait at the door. There's a mini forest growing from the gutters. Lichens are attacking the lawn furniture. The doorbell is dead.

Five years after the financial collapse that seized the housing market in the U.S., hundreds of vacant properties remain scattered across Sussex County, the lingering byproducts of the mortgage crisis.

As spring brings the start of the 2013 construction season, there are tepid hopes this year the housing market turn itself around. Standing in its way, however, are vacant properties like the ones in Newton, Sparta and Byram, which present distinct problems — and unusual opportunities — for homeowners.

Newton resident John Ragsdale has lived in his whitewashed Victorian home on Halsted St. for nearly 20 years.

Over the last three years a handful of homes just a few hundred feet away from his have stood empty as their former owners faced foreclosure.

“That one's been empty for about a year and a half,” Ragsdale said of the house at 42 Halsted St.

Ragsdale is one of hundreds of homeowners living near foreclosed and vacant properties who worry about the decline of their neighborhoods.

“Now you can see that it's an eyesore. It's getting decrepit. It's not being maintained physically, so I am worried about that and what it does for the property values here. Is this thing going to sit another year, another two years? There is one right behind me that's been sitting vacant for two-and-a-half years.”

Empty and unknown
The house at 42 Halsted is currently owned by a bank, which has contracted with an independent property management company to keep the home in line with local codes.

“The banks won't put much money into them other than paying taxes and other minor maintenance, like cutting grass, so they don't get fined by the town,” Ragsdale said.

In the month of February, the property management firm Safeguard performed approximately 800 work orders on properties in just two zip codes, Newton's 07860 and Sparta's 07871.

Though that number reflects only the work orders and not individual properties, Safeguard was the only property management service that reported data. Other major companies, including CoreLogic, and LPS Field Services refused to give numbers on the properties they maintain.

The Sparta Independent found several homes in both Sparta and Newton that carried labels from those two companies by crossing-checking public data on homes with zero water usage. There were also many that had no indication any property manager was looking after them.

In Byram Township, vacant properties have prompted dozens of calls to the town from neighbors complaining about overgrowth, vermin infestations and other problems.

“We do the best we can to get the banks to maintain them,” said Byram Zoning Officer John Gutwerk. “They pretty much haven't changed. We may have even more that have gone empty over the winter that we just don't know about yet.” Gutwerk said that the two to four years it takes to foreclose on a property means that there are many more vacant homes than the township's records reflect. "Complaints always go up this time of year. In another month, when things start to really get green we'll see a lot of the same problems we had last year," he said.

Tipping the scales
Economists estimate that vacant, delinquent and foreclosed homes hold leverage over the prices of surrounding properties.

A 2011 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that vacant or delinquent homes have a negative impact between 1.5 and 3 percent for each distressed property within 500 feet of standard sale.

Although that may seem like threat to a neighborhood, it also represents an opportunity for a purchasers looking to quickly regain value in a home.

But the longer the property stays vacant, the more unlikely it is for a buyer to pick it up.

“Properties that have been vacant for longer than two years are much more likely to have severe problems, such as cracked floors or walls, broken or boarded up windows, and a roof or foundation in disrepair, that make these properties harder to rehabilitate and less appealing to prospective buyers,” said Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth A. Duke.

Still, Ragsdale is hopeful.
“It's a nice town. It's affordable, and there's never been a better time to buy a house,” he said.

The Sussex County Association of Realtors declined to comment on this story.

Editor's note: The original text of this story has been changed to correct errors in reporting.