Australians own condemned GR houses

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - Jerry Buchanan's front door at 957 Dunham SE is covered with notices from city housing inspectors, including one that reads, "Condemned."

He lives at the house with his daughter even though his "furnace went out and me and my daughter didn't have any heat in here." They try to stay in one room to keep warm with electric space heaters.

He rents the house and asked city housing inspectors for help -- but they couldn't get the owner to fix the furnace, either. So the city is boarding the house up, and the Buchanans will have to be out next week.

The landlord for the house on Dunham is real estate agent Lisa Wenk. She shows up as the president of the US operations for an Australian-owned company called Select Properties USA.

The company, according to its own website, gets Australians to invest in foreclosed Grand Rapids rental properties that were bought cheaply. It suggests a $40,000 minimum investment and promises to help investors avoid "the many pitfalls involved with finding those diamonds in the rough."

Instead, Target 8 investigators found a trail of abandoned, boarded-up and broken-down houses blighting Grand Rapids neighborhoods. Code enforcement officers know of 16 properties and have ordered repairs on at least a half-dozen without success.

There are "three tickets now in the court system for Ms. Wenk," chief code officer Virginia Million told Target 8, and added "there's two or three that are being written as we speak."

Among them:

• 317 Gold. Another Select Properties USA property the city condemned with a doorful of notices and a blue tarp over the roof.
• 121 Leonard. A fire-damaged house, empty and boarded up.
• 831 Turner. Another vacant house where renovation work stopped. A city cleanup notice is on the door because of a huge pile of junk in the backyard.

When Target 8 called the Select Properties USA phone number, it was not working.

When Target 8 went to the company office at 6757 Cascade Road, Suite 130, we found a rented mail box in a Pak Mail store.

Lisa Wenk failed to appear at three different court hearings on housing code violations in 2011 and was fined.

"We evaluated some of the property to try to help figure out where they're at, and I've never seen a mess this big before, condemned and just, I didn't even know this existed out there," Mark Troy said. He runs Compass Property Management, a company that Australian interests asked for help. "Probably just a lot of bad mismanagement and what not, so hopefully we can help straighten out some of it."

In an email to a city housing inspector, Lisa Wenk wrote that she was "trying very hard to come up with the funds to make all repairs necessary for all violations for all properties."  But, she lamented, "how can I do that if I don't have funds directly available?"  

She complained that 60% of her tenants were not paying their rent.

Housing inspectors said they were surprised to find an Australian company in the local rental market. They've seen an increase in non-local investment because foreclosed houses are selling cheap. But mostly they've been buyers from the West Coast and Canada.  

Dealing with them can be a problem for inspectors.

"If your owner is in Australia and they fail to comply what do you do? You can send them a ticket and if they ignore it you have no recourse," said Million.

Meanwhile, Jerry Buchanan said he's trying to get rent receipts from the government agency that was subsidizing his rent so he can get city relocation money to pay rent and deposit on a new place to live.