He loves his rowhouse, a top-to-bottom rehab in Greenmount West that he bought for $265,000. It's a little more than he planned to spend, but it's less than comparable homes on his street sold for earlier. And because it was a roofless shell when he signed the contract, he got to pick all the interior touches just like a new home.
"Most of the houses on this block have been renovated," said Cocks, who previously lived in Bowie and was drawn to the transitional neighborhood because a friend bought on the same street.
His home and five others on his street were rebuilt by Dominion Properties, a Baltimore real estate investment company. All had been vacant and rundown; most had been seized by the city.
"We did end up making some money on them, but it was scary, definitely scary," said Jack BeVier, a partner with Dominion. "One thing about this market: It's much more difficult to go into transitional neighborhoods. ... Smaller market of buyers in an already small market. So, [that] makes it more difficult to keep the momentum up."
BeVier thinks the big problem facing the housing market as a whole is that foreclosures are rising but financing to fix them up, either to resell or rent, has gone from a flood to a trickle. Only a few small savings and loans in town are still in that line of lending, he said, and they can lend out only so much.
"Even if you buy a property [for] cash, fix it up [with] cash, it's still really difficult to get it refinanced once it's rented," he said. "If somebody does have cash, they can only do one project."
But investors - seeing deals - are gathering up their money and snapping up properties anyway, BeVier said. A quarter of the Baltimore City homes sold in July were bought entirely with cash, double the share of a year earlier, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. And that's just counting the ones that were listed with a real estate agent.
It's a trend in other markets, too, including Washington, where people with money they don't want to put in the stock market are "buying properties they can easily rent out," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda trade publication.
"In many cases, it's possible to start renting the property instantly with a positive cash flow," he said. "That wasn't possible before when the prices were too high."
