Kari Snyder really didn’t want to spend $62,000 on this vacant rowhouse.
She was on vacation last summer in a beach town and was supposed to be eating dinner with her family when a middleman called her. The boarded-up house in Southeast Baltimore was on the verge of collapsing, and he had the contract to sell it. Snyder couldn’t stomach another investor swooping in, buying the home, and sitting on it.
That’s how she found herself standing outside the restaurant, on her phone, haggling over a home that two years earlier was bought at auction for just $7,000. Somehow, its value had risen nearly ninefold since then. According to Snyder, the man offered a slight discount on his initial asking price, claiming he wanted to help Baltimore.
