12 Bizarre But True Real Estate Horror Stories

Would you buy Jeffrey Dahmer’s house in Akron, OH for $329,000? Read about it and 11 other Bizarre but True Real Estate Horror Stories courtesy of investing site CREonline.com.

1. 3 vs. 1

Dean Foust originally shared his nightmarish experience in a Bloomberg Businessweek column.

2. Backstabber

From the Omaha Homes for Sale Blog: real estate agent Troy Trumm was under the assumption that it was his fiduciary duty to get his clients the best deal possible.

3. Dunce

New South China Mall may be one of the worst commercial real estate investing disasters of all time. “Completed in 2005,” writes MSRE/CFE Vernon Martin for Internationalappraiser.com, “it is the world’s largest mall with leasable area of 7.1 million square feet, gross building area of 9.6 million square feet, space for 2350 stores, and a 99.5% vacancy rate.”

4. Meth Heads

Dawn Turner purchased a home in rural Tennessee and found out two years later, at the time of sale, that the home had once belonged to a person, who was in jail for producing methamphetamine on-site.

5. Subdivided and Conquered

Attorney Ken Koenen of Pleasanton, Calif., shared one real estate horror story involving some clients, who owned a 10-acre a lot (with home)–total price of $390,000–that they planned to subdivide into two 5-acre lots, selling off the vacant lot and refinancing the house lot. In 2009, when they tried to sell

6. Home Robbery

A 76-year old property owner and a real estate agent in La Jolla, a prominent part of San Diego, Calif., were accosted by an armed man at a showing in August 2012.

7. American Real Estate Horror Story

The celebrity-entertainment site TMZ reported on Aug. 18, 2012, that 43-year old actor Morris Chestnut (American Horror Story) recently got involved in a little real estate horror story of his own.

8. Hamptons Wannabes

In the book The Hamptons Real Estate Horror Show by Anonymous Times Two, the authors recall their story of Wesley and Amanda, two small children, accompanying Wesley’s parents on a supposed house shopping trip to the Hamptons in New York.

9. Home Wrecker

VIP Realty representative, Regina Stockwell, in a piece for InvestingAnswers.com recounted one tale of a man who lost his home to foreclosure, and made certain the bank would remember his name.

10. Houses of Horror

It may seem hard to believe, but there is a breed of real estate agent, who specializes in the selling of stigmatized houses, or homes where great tragedies, crimes, or traumas have taken place.

11. Moving Day Disaster

In a piece that originally appeared on the Zillow blog for Yahoo! Real Estate, Seattle resident David Tobey was moving to a new residence within the city when his movers turned what should have been a joyous day into an absolute nightmare.

12. Utility Theft

Via creonline.com

In a recent piece on MSN Real Estate, one landlord/owner going by the name of “Noroom” shared a real estate investing horror story involving a tenant, who had the utilities cut off and “tapped into my property’s electrical lines with an extension cord and ran four heaters off it for a month, until it burned through on the new hardwood floor.”