Opinion / Assessment of a Property

I only skimmed through it, but I find the report to be an outrage. As has already pointed out, the report mentions costs for partial replacements and renewals, basically patchwork. The house is from '58, so almost 60 years old... the second half of its life has long since begun... Tiles are being removed as floor covering, but laminate is being installed instead. Don’t you have to decommission an oil heating system anyway?

I briefly read about cracks in the exterior masonry as well as growth that is already inside the house?

In the past, you could get a bargain at forced auctions, a relative of mine often bought something, renovated it, and sold it again. I thought those times had changed by now, since banks already make pre-sales.

I would definitely advise you to go in with your own appraiser whom you can trust. A lot could have happened last winter as well, which was not present at the time of the 2015 report.

Going in with an expert will probably be impossible. That is the downside of an auction. Isn’t it the case that one still has a right of withdrawal?

Where is the price set? Normally, in forced auctions, the houses are valued at their residual value – that can't be much here. I do believe that if anything, it is purchased for the land.

The owners would definitely still get money, as the house is free of encumbrances and only the ongoing incidental costs to the city of Remscheid were not paid.

Well, if every homeowner faced forced foreclosure just because a few euros for ongoing incidental costs were not paid on time, then there would be chaos in Germany.

It must be assumed (with great caution) that here permanently ongoing costs were not paid and the debtor's creditworthiness is so low that no bank will grant him a loan anymore - even with a supposedly unencumbered house as security (!!) according to your statement. If the owner could get a loan on the free market, he could borrow the money at the currently meager 2%, pay the city, and keep his house.

But he no longer manages this because he no longer gets a loan, or he simply does not want to, or he is no longer physically/mentally able to do so. The reasons vary – but the forced foreclosure is only initiated when all other options have proven fruitless and the amount of outstanding debts is significant in relation to the available capital.

In plain language, this means that the city currently holds claims or has already secured them in the land register, which the debtor cannot service, and these are in the range of about 50% of the market value. Therefore, once again the note: one should expect little to nothing from the owner at this point, otherwise it would never have come this far and the house would have been sold on the free market years ago.

The "freedom from encumbrances" presumably refers to the entries in Section II of the land register. In Section III, the city is probably listed – or the owner has such far-reaching outstanding debts to the city elsewhere (tax debts or levies/street connection fees etc. for possibly other properties) that enforcement is carried out immediately because an entry of forced mortgages would immediately lead to the same result.

The Remscheid city treasury also informed me that the award at the first appointment is already granted at 50% since the claims are covered and probably below that.

However, last night there was a fire in the property so the appointment on Wednesday will of course not take place.

Since the house’s infrastructure was actually shut off, a technical defect is rather unlikely. My personal opinion is that a partial owner, who was also in dispute with the other and told me "I will carry this through to the end," could have something to do with it.

But as I said, that is my personal opinion... Hopefully, the police will investigate what really happened.

Which only fits with what I wrote above. You really have to expect everything with forced foreclosures because there's always a story behind them – and usually not a good one. Expecting active cooperation from the owners at this point is definitely unrealistic, even if there might still be a few pennies left for the owners. This is no comparison to the loss suffered by being sued by the state out of one's own house, and anyone acquiring should be clear about that.

Best regards Dirk Grafe