April 1986
The economy was looking up, so was my career, and as was my ego. I was hired by a small engineering firm there and I was commuting 55 miles each way from my house in Collingswood. My brother had some money to invest, and I was
confident, so I started looking around for a second house. I wanted to buy a house at the
shore with the idea of buying a house that I could live in and we all could share as a summer
time place. Not atypical for people like us, and certainly a safe bet, I thought.
I started shopping by reading the newspaper and then calling up realtors to ask questions. A few of the guys in the office were encouraging me, talking about how cheap their houses were. Well, those guys had bought there houses years and years before. So the prices had indeed gone up quite a bit from the 70s, but I began to extrapolate how much equity we could make from appreciation. My mother , who was always talking about real- estate as an investment, also had convinced me that prices in real estate had always gone up, We all figured it was inevitable that we would build equity by investing that way almost anywhere.
Well, I saw a house across the street from my office in Atlantic City. I was curious. It was a nice, relatively quiet and middle class section of the resort town and I thought, hey, that would be a nice place to buy and rent out part of it while I lived in the other part. I called the real estate agent selling it and talked with them about it. It was way too expensive, but they said, “Hey, we could show you some others like it that you could afford.” That was the hook for me. I went shopping with them and found that, yes, there were houses within mine and my brothers budget. Simple enough.
In retrospect I was way too trusting of the agent. I forgot that his interests were in the buyers camp. But I really was tired of the long hours of commuting 55 miles each way on a construction narrowed toll expressway. And more: summer was approaching (prime rental season).
I quickly narrowed it down to two properties, one only two blocks from the office, and the other a mile downbeach in Ventnor City, the neighboring town to AC. I made an offer to the seller of the AC house and she flatly rejected it. I was disappointed, but I felt that she wanted too much considering the amount of work that it needed. I approached my brother with the idea of offering on the Ventnor house.
Well, Steve didn’t like that Ventnor house one bit, and he told me in no uncertain terms that he would go in on the AC house and nothing else, even if we had to pay top dollar. At the time, he was selling real estate up north, and I thought he knew what the market was like, so I took his commitment to the Chelsea section and not down beach Ventnor as better informed.
My rationale was; it was closer to the jobs in the casinos and had more potential; and I assumed that New Jersey would boom and appreciate like many parts of New York and Chicago did before this. So you have it: my greed is now confessed.
Well, I sat down and figured out what the financing would require, and it turned out that our combined income and so forth was not sufficient to qualify. It was just a wee too much financing to buy it between ourselves.
Enter my mother. We needed a little more buying power, not much, but just her signature would give us a done deal. She agreed, and we set out to apply as a threesome to get a mortgage. Not so fast, said the mortgage banker. Steve had very unstable income and he was not long enough in his new position to help us buy. He told us to take his name off and he would approve it with just my mother and I.
Now it was getting weird, but we all figured, what the heck, things will clear up in a year or two and then we’d refinance it the original way we intended. But we paid too much for it, and I found out quickly that it is hard to rent out an old four bedroom house there.
June 1986
The supposed closing date of June 30th comes and for some strange reason, the 60 day closing that was promised is not to be. My expected summer rental is not to be. Turns out the appraisers are crying that they are swamped and that the mortgage company is not ready either. I smell a rat. Never foudn the rat though. Mybe it was the real estate agents boss, Michael Chort?
August 1986
Well, we bought it and I moved into it. Two weeks after I moved in I had to endure a near
miss by a tropical storm that made me notice how many windows needed
upgrading. The noise and the blowing rain really make me nervous.
Septmeber 1986
The fall of Alton Hegarty: Well, not his fall, it was just that time of year. It was not easy for me to rent a 4 bedroom house in Atlantic City. I was supposed to I live in the apartment, but no one was answering the ads for the house rental. I decided, in the interest of getting the cash flow going, that I would rent the apartment instead and just take the house section and get room-mates. Not the best change of situation I ever had. You will see why as the plot unfolds.
1987
The winter of Franco and that gay dancer from New York who vanished after 2 months. I spent the summer weekend running AWAY from the shore to work on renovating my Collingswood house. Very strange.
November 1987
Hot water is always in shortage. The old heater goes berzerk and smokes up the
whole house. Turns out the chimney is completely crudded by the old heater after only 1
season we have to replace it and add a hot water heater. Now we have major hot water, but
now the toilets in the basement are always backing up.
1988
The year everything broke down. I lose my job and can only go back to Philly. I ask
Franco to interview prospective tenants for the vacant apartment downstairs while I am on
vacation. I come back and find that Franco has already given a moron with no job and his
stupid girlfriend the keys and they are already moved in. Franco tells Mom that's what I told
him to do. LIAR! I futilely check his references only to out find that his references are fake.
Franco has really screwed up and screwed us up good. Here is why...
My room-mates all move out at once about 4 weeks after Basso and his girl move in. They claim that Basso is malicious, threatening them and using foul language to them. It seems that things are disappearing around the two other apartments . Someone has broken into the upstairs and stolen certain things like a radio and a TV. Someone has also broken into my gardening tool closet, which is right outside Bassos front door. Nonetheless my gardening tools and supplies are completely gone! Somehow Basso, who is always there, has not heard or seen any of the breakins. Is he blind and deaf?
I’m more than a little upset. This would end with an eviction in less than 2 months, since they only had a deposit and one months rent. After that they never paid another penny. Not only that, but my brother suspects that the smells coming from there apartment are indicating a serious plumbing problem and they don’t seem to care or want help with it. Steve tries to get permission to inspect the bathroom and they refuse. Instead they threaten him for trying. They are the tenants from hell!
Later we find they have rigged the cable and telephone to steal from a neighbors connections, and they have made a pathetic homemade door barricade with nails and stick lumber, apparently fearing that we will enter with our keys and surprise them. Surprise them sniffing glue or shooting dope I suppose.
Basso threatens me with a spiked ball bat when I complain that he is making too much noise.
I was angry and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to stop the loud banging. Admittedly I was using strong language, by then, Basso never did comprehend anything I ever told him while he lived there as a tenant. I did not threaten, I ordered him to stop it. When I went upstairs he began making a racket again.
His purpose seemed to be a protest against my carpentry noises upstairs. I went back down and yelled again for him to stop, this time I was angry and yelled through the door. I felt like a prison guard telling the prisoners to behave or else. Basso came out of the apartment with a baseball bat in his hand. It has nails sticking out of it. I don't think he was using it for hitting baseballs. ( I had seen this in the bathroom earlier when I had gone down there to work on the ceiling. )
As he came out of the door he lifted it as if to attack me. I wasted no time and ran the other way. He followed me on the dead run, bat raised and poised to swing. He followed me all the way across the street into the pizza restaurant on Ventnor Avenue. I knew at that point that I was dealing with a very sick person, as he followed me into the restaurant, bat raised, in view of about 20 very surprised people.
I think he only then realized where he was (I think he had poor eyesight to boot), and ran away when all the people began yelling and screaming. We all called the police. The police came and were totally useless, as Atlantic City police are; they didn’t know what to do. Basso had apparently hidden the bat. (Unfortunately, I was wearing a workbelt with a hammer and a rubber mallet, so it looked like I was armed or something) They threatened to arrest me and said they would just as soon arrest both of us! Even with all the witnesses who saw him chasing me into the Pizza place! Maybe I should have done that!
It was really bizarre. He had already obstructed me in the performance of my duties as landlord by preventing entrance to fix the stopped up toilet and other things. It was like he didn't comprehend that repairs were needed and just didn't want either my brother or me to fix things around there!
After the deputy shows up and spends 10 hours standing in the front of the apartment do they finally get out. Two of my brothers tires mysteriously go flat while this is going on. The neighborhood has officially gone to the dogs!
November 1988
Now that Basso and Co. are gone, I resolve to make the downstairs apartment kitchen more attractive. I don't want another tenant like Basso. I start to make some major additions to the sparse cabinets in there. Going down on Saturday mornings and staying until Sunday nights. But... I make the mistake of leaving power tools worth about $1000 at the house. GONE! The police can't be bothered to come and take the report. They tell me to go to the station to make the report! I think I can guess who stole them. Who else would have broken in without leaving any trace of breaking the door or a window?
December 1988
Franco is very obviously addicted to Heroin and unable to get around. He loses his job, his
girlfriend abandons him and I have to throw him out of the house.
I still have to contend with a persistent downstairs toilet problem. Finally, in desperation, I decide to dig down to the house sewer pipe in the yard. There, I find a clay tile pipe with a hole in it, and a strangely made concrete joint that needs to be remade. A plumber comes and fixes it: the problem goes away, for a little while. The house and apartment are very, very empty. Atlantic City can be a lonely, desolate place in late fall and Winter when everyone is gone and you are stuck with the mortgage.
Winter 1989
I do a major rehab of the kitchen down stairs and some significant work in the upstairs
kitchen. We take the front two bedrooms and add that to the rear apartment to make a larger
apartment. Since I am not a licensed contractor, and I am working on a duplex, the city
refuses to issue me a construction permit. No exceptions. Seems they think that duplex owners can afford to hire an outside contractor more than single family owners. They don't really think I decide.
I take the matter into my own hands and do the conversion myself without a permit. It's really that desperate. I review my drawings with my licensed architect and engineer friends, and make sure to follow BOCA and NJ codes just to be on the safe side.
1990
We decide to sell. We are confronted with the hardship of trying to sell in a falling market. No one but no one is looking to buy. The city is hurting for money so they raise taxes by another 20%
1991
The house section proves to be an albatross, as we cannot find even a single person to rent it at even a low price. We get dozens of calls on it but only show it to maybe 5 interested parties. One of the parties is an immigrant family that wants it to put 9 people up.
The downstairs tenant, Sandy Veney decides to sue us for raising the rent of her now greatly enlarged apartment above the city approved rent control level. Seems the city will only permit us a raise of 3% maximum per year ($12). At that rate we could catch up to actual costs after another 16 years! I can’t stop this because the wall was taken down without a permit, etc, I can't tell them what I did. We are losing $100-200/month before the judge orders us to pay her back $2500. Now we are really being screwed. Nice set of laws designed to make it cheap for the tenant, prevent ANY return on investment for the landlord. Bad bad Landlord
Summer 1991
We finally get to rent the house during the summer for a vacation rental. Big Deal. Barely an excuse for rental income. The summer tenants break lots of furniture and run the water bill sky high. The dryer finally dies, after years of trying to keep it running with duct tape and sheetmetal screws.
1992
Margarita moves in: She is Sooooo happy to have a house! The rent is too high for her,
but supposedly her sister and nephew, who works, will help.
Sure it does. Margarita is sweet until the Smiths move in after Labor Day. Margarita and her sister start acting like they are on drugs. They are.
Within a month the Smith family in the downstairs try to use minor repairs as a means to get rent abatement from the courts and the city housing inspector. I remain optimistic I make a friendship with the authorities by showing up at their offices to show I mean to comply with every citation. I have no intention of letting good rental income go away.. I start making repairs one after another during repeated Saturday treks there. It doesn't matter. They stop paying rent in November.
Christmas 1992
Major nor’easter and the Smiths do their major vandal act on the apartment and vanish. $4000 worth of damages and another winter without rental income to cover the outrageous mortgage. Our property taxes continue to soar.
Property values have not gone up.
January 1993
Margarita and family are evicted. I renovated both parts of the upstairs and most of the downstairs. Still another winter with no income. Major outgo. The city decides $2800/year is not enough in taxes, so they raise them yet another 10%. They must think home owners have deep pockets that grow deeper by the year. Our taxes have risen by 50% in only 6 years!
My intention is to make both repairs that fix the damage, and to sweep through every little defect and end all complaints and citations. This is extensive. I find many problems, which I had considered nuisances, are due to previous fixes by prior owner that were poorly done.
I finally find that elusive plug of dirt in the upstairs shower drain that had been a problem for 5 years. It had always filled up to the ankles of the showerer and taken 20 minutes for a typical shower to go down the drain. Previous roddings never really got it. This time I use two lengths of 20' snake to force one down the drain pipe instead of allowing it to turn up the vent pipe. I feed one into the bathtub overflow to block the other from making a shortcut. I also remove the drywall ceiling below (for the third time in 4 years) to dismantle and observe the trap. It take a mere hour to fix this. Unbelievable!
February 1993
Rich and helper fix the downstairs and make the upgrades, again without a permit, since Rich
is not licensed in AC, and the local contractors are quoting me $2000 more (being unrealistic about the value!) and they are less trustworthy than Rich anyway. I've never found the local contractors to be worth their high charges.
April 1993
The insurance company threatens to cancel us for peeling paint on the exterior because we
could not afford to paint it. (Supposedly it was painted before we bought it.) So for 7 months
Steve and I spend almost every Sunday scraping and burning paint on the exterior. I remove
crumbling glazing and reglaze 80% of the windows. We saved over $2000 for doing what we
did. We never finished because it finally sells in September.
September 1993
Major relief to put it mildly. We get $13000 less, or 12% less, than we paid for it in 1986, 7 years prior. That doesn't count the $10,000 of repairs and countless hours of our labor.
November 26, 1996