House For Sale – Drug Seizure Up For Grabs

About a year ago I happened to look out the window of my office when I was working from home one day.  We live in a quiet, nice neighborhood in the suburbs of Seattle.  Nothing ever happens around here and all in all it’s a peaceful existence.  People that live in the neighborhood are all solidly “middle class” and most have white collar jobs that earn decent incomes.  So it was quite a surprise when I looked out the window and saw swat team members marching down the street (not our street but the one at the end of our street).  They were headed to the house in the picture to serve a search warrant.  Apparently the house had been under surveillance for some time and was part of a large marijuana grow operation.  Yes, that’s a first for our neighborhood.

Here’s what the bad guys do:

They buy a house in a nice neighborhood, sometimes for cash.  They then quietly move a person in and proceed to start building a massive marijuana grow operation.  Basically the house turns in to one heck of an indoor garden.  They use bedrooms, living rooms, basements, pretty much everywhere in the house to grow marijuana.  I had heard of this before from my wife’s uncle that lives in Vancouver BC.  It’s a huge problem up there with multiple houses in neighborhoods being used for this.  I think that’s where “BC Bud” comes from.

So, here was this nice quiet house who’s owner was never seen.  This isn’t the typical drug house in that they don’t deal the pot out of the house.  It’s simply a grow operation and the marijuana is sold in large quantities elsewhere.  You would have never guessed this was going on inside.  After the bust was over, the only sign that there was anything going on there at all was a large pile of fertilized dirt in the garage.  The front door was open for weeks because the police had smashed the latch open during their initial storming of the house. The police may have got in touch with a service similar to this meth lab cleanup one to make sure that the property was cleaned and all traces of the former operation were gone but, then again, this might be something that they are leaving whoever moves in next to sort.

And did I mention the police?  Most of them were federal DEA agents etc.  You would have never known that they were DEA etc because they were driving some really nice cars.  I’m talking Lexus, BMW, etc.  I hope that they confiscated those cars from drug dealers as opposed to using tax money for them.  While I support these guys 110%, I don’t like the idea of using high end luxury cars for their work.

So, why am I even blogging about this?  Well, the house just went up for sale.  See the picture above.  It’s listed for $386,000 “as is”.  This is a full 75,000 less than comparables in the neighborhood and is sure to bring down prices in our neighborhood a bit.  I’ll be surprised if it isn’t sold very quickly, although I have no idea what it looks like inside.  It’s in a culdesac location though so I’m sure it will probably go pretty fast regardless of the condition.  If someone can buy the house that cheap and get in to a premium location, it’s probably worth a little sweat equity.