There are the good flippers and there are the bad flippers. The good flippers are the thieves in city hall and social organizations who employ professional grant writers to obtain millions in taxpayer dollars to fund their inflated contracts and throw them to their campaign contributors who just happen to be contractors. The bad flippers are private investors, builders, and developers who are able to complete projects and improve communities in half the time at one tenth the cost.
Technically this is not flipping, if the city is buying and clearing the land, but what do those real estate experts in city hall know?
City admits it is flipping property - Posted by Dick(FL)
Posted by Dick(FL) on February 25, 2002 at 09:02:38:
From Sunday’s St. Petersburg Times:
City Buys Property to Rebuild Midtown
…The city’s strategy is to buy, clear, then sell to developers who will bring stores, offices and jobs (read tenants) to blighted strips (read houses that need to be rehabbed)…
… (Mayor Rick) Baker and (Deputy Mayor Goliath) Davis call this buy, clear and sell process “flipping” land…
…Because the city used some money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it had to pay prices for some building that were many times their taxable assessed value…The HUD rules demand that appaisers value the property the city is buying by comparing it with similar property outside the “blighted” area being redeveloped…(Baker) said the city will collect higher property taxes from the site for years if a multimillion-dollar factory is built there, and that the city stands to recover its investment many times over (read profit)…