Key West Real Estate Horror Stories - Below SubZero

This really happened. About 27 years ago. That Key West business that I dealt with is no longer in business. Thank God.

In October 1993 I purchased a former guest house in Key West at a public auction held by the Small Business Administration. The SBA had foreclosed a mortgage on an operating guest house located in a prime Old Town location. The building sat boarded up for two years. I took possession in December 1993 and undertook the clean-up and moved forward to re-opening the business.

I drove out on Roosevelt Boulevard to a local appliance dealer that sold SubZero appliances. I purchased a new stand alone refrigerator and stand alone freezer. I previously owned a SubZero in Denver and knew it to be reliable brand. I wanted the best. Not the cheapest.

We had just refinished the wood floors in the kitchen. They looked great. The delivery truck arrived. The appliances were already unpacked from the shipping boxes. The deliverymen put each appliance on a dolly and brought them into the kitchen. The floor was scratched in the process. It was a huge gouge. Repairable, but annoying. 

The deliverymen set the appliances up and left. Within a few weeks the freezer acted up. It did not work. I called the dealer who sent a repairman. It worked until it did not work again. I called the dealer who sent the repairman who messed with it and then left. It worked until it stopped again. I called the dealer who said he could not deal with ME. 

This was 1994 - before the Internet and Google. I found the name and fax number of SubZero. I sent a FAX to the President of SubZero  in Wisconsin and detailed my problem.

A day later. One day later. Not two days or a week. A day later. I got a telephone call from the president of SubZero's secretaty who said she would refer my problem to person in Florida. A day or two later I got a phone call from that person. He was a state or regional honcho. He asked a bunch of questions including the Model Number and Serial Number on the freezer. There was none. NONE. 

I know what identification plates look like. There was none. The guy on the telephone was distressed. He said he would come down himself. He did. He was PISSED OFF. There was no plate on that SubZero. Somebody was f****ng  with his product.  Within a couple of days he had a brand new freezer delivered to me that was still in the box.

The local dealer I dealt with in Key West is no longer in business nor is the repairman. Locals know their names. Their names are not important. SubZero as brand stood behind its products and took care of my problem.

Key West Real Estate Horror Story No. 3

Several years ago a man read my blog and contacted me to help him find a home in Key West. He was retiring from his life's work at a northern university and was looking for a modest home in our gay friendly town. He was a single man who wanted to find a place for him and his older adult companion who had some physical disabilities. He explained they were just friends and not lovers nor partners.  He had a modest retirement and needed to find something in the $300,000 range. We discussed various properties that were available and created our short list of places to look at. One such place was a cute little two story house on a secluded Key West lane.

The first time we looked at the house I questioned the viability of the place for his friend who needed to use crutches or a walker to get around.  While there were two bedrooms, the stairway to the second floor bedroom was so steep that you had to walk down the stairs backwards. I told my buyer it would not work for him. He was in his early sixties and I could see he had his own mobility issues. He said he could make it work.  The house was priced right and he could make do. He put his personal comfort aside to find a place where he and his friend could afford-ably live. I wrote an offer.

The listing real estate agent was a former New York City attorney. When we submitted a pretty simple offer, we got a whole lotta legal stuff thrown back at us. I don't recall what the issues were, but I do remember my buyer's reaction:  he would find someplace else rather than deal with that lawyer. Now, remember, that the listing real estate agent used to be a lawyer in a state 1440 miles away.  And also remember that the agent no longer was a lawyer. But that's not the way my buyer perceived the role of this lawyer-cum real estate sales person. (As a side note that house did not sell under that agent. In fact it took the owner several more years to sell the house because of the challenging staircase that my buyer was willing to accept. Sometimes sellers might want to ask themselves why their place can't sell when houses all around them do sell. If it's not the price, maybe it's something wrong with the house or the real estate agent or both.)  We moved on.

We expanded our search and moved away from the favored Old Town area and looked in less expensive mid-town part of town. A home on busy Flagler Avenue and near Key West High School was offered at a price my buyer could afford. It had three ground floor bedrooms, two bathrooms, nice outdoor spaces, and a potential garden for my buyer to cultivate. He bought it without any hullabaloo. I stopped by the house a couple of weeks after he moved in to deliver a thank you gift. He loved his new home. Another dream of moving to Key West had been fulfilled. That was the end of the story, or so I thought.

Four years later I saw a story on the front page of the Key West Citizen about my buyer: he had been shot to death just after he entered his bedroom one morning after returning from the botanical gardens. Locals dismissed the claims of a homeless man who was an ear-witness to the murder as it happened including the next door neighbor who was a local judge. CLICK HERE to read the Broward Times item that tells the tale about the murder that went ignored for three days.

I have been in business for forty-three years. I have been a lawyer, banker, federal government employee, guest house owner, and Realtor. As a kid I sold donuts door-to-door, Christmas and all occasion cars door-to-door, drove a furniture store delivery truck, worked at the post office, fueled airplanes at the county airport, and was a legal staff assistant to a judge while attending law school.  I bring with me a set of business skills from each of the jobs I have had in my life. Today I sell houses. I am no longer a lawyer and don't give legal advice. When I see an issue, I tell my customer to discuss the matter with a real estate lawyer. My job is to make deals happen and not to create barriers to deals getting done.

Key West Real Estate Horror Story No.2

I rarely watch any of the new horror genre TV shows because I just don't like to get scarred. I loved them when I was younger because I knew the stories and all the gore was fake.  Back in the 1950s when I was growing up we did not have mass shootings, terrorists, and madmen running amok. As I have grown older I realized that the things that really scare me the most are the things that area real, not things that are imagined. Back in the 1950s people with mental problems were often confined to state run institutions. The courts later decided that institutionalizing people was not right and set those people free. Not all people that are homeless that walk the streets are mad, nor are all the people who own homes sane. Maybe losing one's home can make a person a bit crazy, or maybe some people stress out too much in life and end up losing their homes. Today's blog is about a real life house of horror in Key West which became a bank owned property.

A few years ago an agent put up a "For Sale" sign in front of a rather attractive house in Old Town Key West. I drove past the sign for several days and kept waiting for the property to get entered into the Key West mls. I was sure I might have an interested buyer because of the style and what I perceived to be condition of the house. The house was located on one of the better blocks in Old Town. The house next door had sold for over two million dollars a couple of years before. The house across the street likewise sold in excess of two million dollars. I knew this particular house had been foreclosed. I was eager to find a buyer for this place before it hit the market.

I called the listing agent who told me the bank owner was not ready to list the property yet. She offered to let me go inside to take photos for my buyer. She told me a history of the property and warned me to be careful as the house had all kings of things I could fall over. I accepted the offer and went over and photographed the house.

The property was a two story revival style house with a lot of gingerbread on the outside.  For some reason the gingerbread was not used as architectural trim in Key West like it was in other parts of the United States.  There are instances of it to be sure. But most of our period architecture was linear clean lines whether the house was a cottage or a Grand Conch House.  So this particular house stood out a bit. When I opened the front door I saw a staircase on the right wall that lead to an exposed second floor landing that wrapped that space. The stairway was cluttered with junk and cobwebs draped downward from the ceiling.

The doorway from the main entry into the original parlor or front room was blocked off. I made my way towards the rear and came back through a maze of boxes and piles of "stuff". The downstairs area had been gutted as if it were in the process of being rebuilt. But it appeared as though no real construction had been done inside this house for years. I moved to the front of the house. That's when I saw the cages. Cages on the floor and cages lining the walls. Cages where rabbits were housed. There were no living animals in any of the cages when I entered the property.

 I decided to see what was on the second floor. Something happened as I walked up the stairs - something almost surreal. You can see it in the way the photographs changed. I did nothing to the camera. I did not notice anything until I returned to me computer to upload the photos. The photos from the stairway up and around the second floor seem to be possessed in some way. I'm not a believer in ghosts, but something evil happened here.

I have been inside a lot of bank owned properties over the years. I used to manage commercial workouts for a national bank in Denver. I have seen many places where people lived worse than animals. This place topped them all. The master bedroom with en-suite bath was located at the rear of the second floor. The bed was soiled from ages of someone having slept in the same confined spot without washing the sheets: there was no way to put new sheets on without cleaning up the room. Heaven forbid cleaning up the room. 

I made my way back to the hallway and moved to the front bedroom. After I saw the master bedroom I knew nothing could be worse. I was wrong.

I saw the first cage just off the hallway as it expanded to the right. The cage was located just in front of the laundry. The cobwebs are real as is the dried animal waste on the floors. The floors were littered with so much waste that I had to breath through my mouth. I had to take photos to document this place. I could not leave before I took enough photos.

The little fury things on the photo two above are dead rabbits. The little black things are rabbit waste. The cages are where the rabbits lived before they died in this house of horrors.

The property was sold to a party who gutted the entire house and drove out all the bad spirits. The place was beautifully renovated.  A fellow agent sold it  a couple of years ago for in excess of $1.6 million.