When Chad Wright first saw the three-story, 19th-century rowhouse on Madison Avenue in Reservoir Hill, he fell in love with it, even though it was infested with termites and had a tree growing through the back wall. The house had been vacant for years, but that didn't dissuade him.
"I saw the potential," said Wright, 26, who bought the rowhouse for $25,000. His settlement was in April 2004, and he began work on the house the next weekend. Almost a year and $200,000 later, he is in the final stages of the rehabilitation, which he has done mostly in his spare time while he worked by day designing sprinkler systems for Livingston Fire Protection.
Wright is among the first to nearly finish rehabbing a house purchased through a relatively new Baltimore program, Project SCOPE - or "Selling City Owned Properties Efficiently," designed to streamline the sale of vacant houses. It taps the same market mechanisms that most private home sellers rely on - Realtors and the Multiple Listing Service.
In the past, buyers had to track down individual properties through the Department of Housing and Community Development or the Department of Real Estate, and properties were often encumbered by liens for back taxes or water bills, making any purchase an arduous process. Now the city, like any home seller, pays real estate agents a commission in exchange for their expertise and to get the properties on the listing service.
In homes like Wright's, the 18-month-old program is yielding its first fruits. Fifty-one properties have been sold. Another 34 - mostly rowhouses - are under contract, and 30 more are available. And the city is planning on putting more houses on the market.
Buyers have included homeowners and small-scale investors from Baltimore, Washington and New York, said Vito Simone, a Baltimore real estate broker involved in starting the project.
Though SCOPE sales account for a tiny fraction of the city's inventory of vacant houses, officials say it's a promising way to move homes to individuals and small investors and complements Baltimore's Project 5,000, which sells properties to large investors for redevelopment.
The city has reaped about $1.3 million from the sales and looks forward to collecting property taxes on homes that had been a drain on its coffers. Beyond that, there's the benefit to neighborhoods of turning a boarded-up eyesore into a spiffed-up, lived-in home.
