The New York Times, June 19, 2019: Want a house like this? Prepare for a bidding war with investors
The house at 1375 Boulevard Lorraine always had what real estate people call “good bones.” A Craftsman-style bungalow, the house was modest — just 1,600 square feet on a single story — but it had a spacious front porch, and it sat on a corner lot atop a sloping lawn that meant passers-by looked up at it from the street. It was built in 1935, when this southwest Atlanta neighborhood, known as Adams Park, was a prosperous, middle-class area.
By the time an investor bought it in 2018, however, both the house and the neighborhood had fallen on hard times. Southwest Atlanta had been devastated by the foreclosure crisis, which turned whole blocks into rows of boarded-up houses and overgrown lawns. Boulevard Lorraine, with its canopy of arching trees, never fell quite that far, but it struggled. The property listing for the house called it “a great fixer upper” before warning prospective buyers that it was being “sold as is.” Louis Jackson, an investor operating through a limited liability corporation, paid just $85,000 for it.
