If you're looking for a fixer-upper at a bargain price, there's a decent chance you'll see something that piques your interest at the Lucas County Auditor's annual forfeited-land sale.
Several of this year's 50 or so houses, buildings, and slices of land up for auction Friday have potential if you squint. And for many bidders — especially if a property can be had for only a few hundred bucks, or a couple grand — a little potential is good enough.
"For some individuals, it's the opportunity of a lifetime," Auditor Anita Lopez said. "They can't afford to go through a normal mortgage process, to qualify for a home loan.
"They're going to fix it up and rehab it, and this is going to be their dream home."
But there's no way to fully investigate the properties beforehand — which means many buyers take on bigger projects than they can handle or afford, said David Mann, president and chief executive of the Lucas County Land Bank.
In those cases the properties often just keep sitting empty and deteriorating, he said, with new owners who might not pay their property taxes, just like the old owners.
"Our worry has always been that auctioning them off to relatively low bids doesn't guarantee that anything good happens for the community," Mr. Mann said.
Properties that wind up on the auditor's auction block are tax delinquent and have gone through the foreclosure process. And they have already failed to sell twice, for at least the back taxes owed, in sales held by the Lucas County Sheriff's Office.
They tend to be "the most distressed, the most expensive-to-solve properties in the community," Mr. Mann said. The auditor’s own instructions on the auction warn that many of the properties have “undesirable characteristics, especially those which are being re-offered this year.” Some are already scheduled for demolition.
A first round of bids at the auditor’s auction again starts with the delinquent tax amount for each property. Then, those unsold properties can be auctioned for much cheaper in a second round of bidding, often starting at a minimum bid of $100, Ms. Lopez said.
The deadline to register for this week's auction is noon Monday, with rules and registration information on the auditor's website, co.lucas.oh.us/Auditor. The auction itself is at 10 a.m. Friday in the Commissioners Hearing Room at One Government Center. In the future Ms. Lopez said her office plans to start running the auctions online.
"There's some close bidding," Ms. Lopez said of the annual event. "Suddenly we're at $100 — then $2,000, $3,000."
On this year's auction list are houses, various pieces of land, rundown structures, even an old church.
In East Toledo on an otherwise well-kept stretch of Elgin Avenue is a large home with a boarded-up front door, tilting front steps, and vines crawling across the siding. The roof looked to be in poor shape, but it's hard to tell just how bad from the street. The last owner was $7,000 behind in taxes.
In North Toledo on Cecelia Avenue, near the freeway and not far from the Jeep plant, is a one-story home with a tree in front and newer-looking vinyl siding. But the porch appeared ready to topple over and there was a concerning crease down the middle of the roof. The last owner owed nearly $25,000 in taxes.
In West Toledo is a large empty field on Yermo Drive up for bidding, just north of Alexis Road. It is sandwiched between an apartment complex and a Taco Bell, and its last owner was $53,000 behind.
The auditor’s auctions used to include more properties, and were held twice a year. But Ms. Lopez said the land bank, created a dozen years ago, now acquires many of the properties before they make it to auction.
Land banks around the state, she said, "have made a tremendous impact in identifying homes that should not be sold to the wrong person."
Mr. Mann said the land bank steps in whenever it thinks there is a good opportunity to acquire a property and figures out a productive use for it, whether that's putting in some improvements to a house and placing it back on the market, or selling a small lot to a neighbor who will keep it up.
There's a tough balance to be struck, Ms. Lopez said, between auctioning off cheap properties to people who really want them, and will put in the work to improve them, versus "investors who are just going to let it become further blight."
First Published December 3, 2022, 1:36 p.m.
