Jake Butcher Mansion Update for August 2, 2012

WOW! 1,700 views on my humble little Jake Butcher Mansion blog. Haven't heard any activity on the place as of yet. I checked online today with the bank that owns the property, Commercial Bank in Harrogate, TN - Whirlwind is still for sale at a ridiculous $1.2 million.

On December 27th the tax man cometh with another $10,800 or more. How much fun for Commerical Bank getting bills month after month: utilities, maintenance, increasing deterioration and repairs just to show the property. tsk tsk tsk.

It's been 3 months since I made my offer to Commercial Bank in Farragut and, just in case they're reading this, (hi there) my offer stands. Commercial Bank: ring me up, start a conversation, let's get involved. As far as I'm concerned, negotiations are still open.

People may view me crazy to continue interest in Whirlwind but I have my reasons and there is a purpose.

The Knoxville MLS has not changed the listing on the Butcher Mansion. Same Realtor, same price, same write-up, same photos. Same ol', same ol' I guess.

According to my back-end statistics, the majority of people viewing this site are coming from a Windows based system, using Internet Explorer followed by Safari. Iphone users log in after Windows users but only make up 6% of my viewers.

I always love to see what keywords bring people in and who's looking at the site. Don't worry, I can't see who you are, but I can see if you're coming from a company, like Coldwell Banker Wallace & Wallace - who happens to have the listing on the Butcher Mansion. I also find it entertaining to see attorney offices with 5 or 6 names behind them logging in. It makes me feel like someone's tattling and folks are checking in to see if I'm behaving. I am.

My peeps in the United States represent most of my readers but I'd like to give a big shout out to Latvia who comes in a close second for most views. Holla! Who knew?!

180 Whirlwind Estate: Butcher Mansion Basement

This beautiful wine cellar is NOT in the Butcher mansion. 

The REALTOR with the listing for 180 Whirlwind Estate, also known as Jake Butcher Mansion, also known as 182 Whirlwind Lane, provided me with a brief history of the Butcher home. Being a local I was already familiar with the home. I'd already been inside it and I'd read every article and document about it I could get my hands on. The description provided to me by the Realtor was awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, the description provided to me was completely misleading.

I don't know where the Realtor got the description but I can tell you it was either from decades past or from someone who has never seen the home.

One of my cousins who toured the property with me got into the car following our tour and said, "Wow. That is some serious false advertising."

The description I received stated: "Beneath the kitchen wing of the house is a basement with special storage rooms to hold a grocery store full of items as well as storage for tools and a workshop. There was also a bath and game room with pool table and one of the states finest private wine cellars."

There's a mix of tenses in the above two sentences but I'm not going to dwell too much on that because I've been known to do that myself. I merely wish to point out that there is a basement beneath of portion of the kitchen wing of the house. There is some storage. There is a room and there is a cellar.

However, the space offers nothing more than a bare-bones, depressing state of disrepair.

There's a game room, of sorts. It's a dark, square room with low ceilings and acoustic tile. Some of the ceiling tile is missing and a jungle of wires and pipes are exposed. There's rot, mildew and mold. There's also animal feces. The basement, indeed, assaults the nostrils with its formidable scent.

There are doors leading from the "game room" to a tunnel that goes out to the tennis courts. The tunnel is not entirely underground: it's more like a Mean-Joe-Green-Have-a-Coke-and-a-Smile kind of tunnel. The doors opening to the tunnel have two square windows spray painted black. There is no light in the basement.

The wine cellar is most definitely not "one of the states finest private wine cellars" not by any stretch of the imagination. The "wine cellar" looks more like an old English dungeon where one might store bodies - only not as nice as a dungeon.

The storage space that would supposedly house a grocery store might store the contents of a 2-car garage - if you exclude cars and lawn equipment.

If I had to guess based on memory and the fact that we were in total darkness, I'd guess the entire basement comes in at 2,000 sqft tops.

See, here's the thing: I hate being lied to. I really do. I especially hate when someone tries to sell me a lie. The advertising I have seen regarding the Butcher mansion goes beyond optimism and delusion, it is, in my opinion, a flat-out lie.

It's time to get real. You want to see the basement? This is video taken when my family and I toured the house with the Realtor.

180 Whirlwind Clinton, TN Blog: Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game

In yesterday's post I linked to the video I put together on the coal ash spill in Harriman. I linked to it because of the Butcher Mansion's proximity to Bull Run Steam Plant. Bull Run is a coal-fired electric generating plant. Coal by itself is not dangerous but the byproduct is. When you grow up in Oak Ridge and you're told not to eat the fish in the lakes because of the Mercury, you take it for granted. Oh, okay. Don't eat the fish? Mercury? Sure. What they don't hammer home is that Mercury is a known carcinogen and has shown to cause reduced levels of intelligence in children. And Mercury's merely one of the issues you have to worry about with a coal-fired plant.

The Oak Ridger reported that after a fire broke out at Bull Run in April of this year, TVA stated they were continuing to monitor the "hot spots." They're not talking about heat from the fire when they say 'hot spots', they're talking about levels of toxicity.

Immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, employees at the plants were sent home and the plants went on high alert. Why? Because the plants are known targets for terrorists due to the dangerous materials they produce.

I'm fired up today because when I went to post that link, I read through some of the comments on the video. I know I shouldn't have. I told myself after the first year to stop. People are ignorant - they probably ate the fish.

People said it didn't happen, it's not toxic because TVA said it wasn't, we're making a big deal out of nothing, people are just trying to take advantage and get paid, the pictures were doctored, the before shots were not taken at the spill site, people are faking illness. It gets to me. Particularly because it's my family, my friends and it's real.

Another recurring comment that gets to me is when people attack the lifestyle that was lost. "Oh, the poor rich people lost their homes, boo-hoo." That's why I labeled this post "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game." I should have titled it, "Don't Hate the Player, Hate YOUR Game."

To these people I say: First of all, dummy, there were people of largely varying economic backgrounds in that area. They were all impacted.

And the bullshit victim mentality you display because you don't have any money is nauseating. If you don't like where you are in life, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Yes my parents had a very nice home on the water. But they started out barely scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck. If they ran out of food, it was gone. If they couldn't pay utilities, they got shut off. They sacrificed, they saved, they took low paying jobs in exchange for college reimbursement in order to make it happen. And in their spare time, which wasn't much, they took what they were good at and found a way to make additional money. They saved, they budgeted and they eventually built their dream home on the river. And two years later, it was lost.

My brother is adopted. He had a shitty childhood. He was taken from squalor, separated from his brothers and bounced around from foster home to foster home until he joined our family. He struggled. He got in with a bad crowd, got into things he shouldn't have, lived out of cheap motels. He used to say, "this is just who I am. I was born this way. It's in my DNA." To which I would reply, "Yeah, it's called the Camaro gene and you can overcome it." Eventually, Russ decided he had had enough of that life. In his thirties, he went back to school. He got a technical degree. He now has a great job, insurance, 401K, company car, company phone and he's going to be buying his first house. It took him a while, but he did it. He chose to make a better life for himself and his son.

My husband's parents were divorced and money was tight. Mike went to college on student loans, a music scholarship and a baseball scholarship. But then halfway through college, he dropped out. He dropped out to join the Air Force. The Air Force provided him a roof over his head, free meals at the chow hall, insurance, free college tuition and the opportunity to better himself. When we got married, even with the regular paycheck the Air Force provided, we were living below the poverty level. But we didn't stay there for long. Mike continued to go up in rank. The Air Force paid him to finish his Bachelors degree. Ten years into his enlistment, Mike chose to apply for the officer program and he made it. The Air Force then paid for Mike to get a Master's degree. Mike will be retiring in a few months as a Major. He's going from a six figure income into another six figure income and he'll have a $30,000 pension and insurance from the Air Force for the rest of his life. To this day, I clip coupons, I shop at Goodwill, I buy second-hand furniture and I run out the door for a Craigslist curb-alert. I will never buy a new car, my old Ford Windstar minivan is still running and it's paid off. I will drive it until duct-tape can no longer hold it together and keep it on the road. And then I will get another cheap-ass car.

Not enough hardship for you? Look at Oprah Winfrey. She came from poverty and abuse and was rejected time after time in her pursuit of bettering herself. She had doubts, insecurities, seemingly insurmountable odds but she made it. She made herself a legend and an inspiration to millions around the globe.

A movie was made about the story of Chris Gardner. He was struggling to get by, had a five year old son, his girlfriend left him, and he decided he had to come up with a plan to better himself. He took an unpaid internship that offered a better future. It was a hardship: he was homeless for a year. Homeless with a five year old. They slept on the streets, in homeless shelters and in locked metro station bathrooms. But he overcame his hardships and went on to become a millionaire.

If you didn't get a solid education, read! If you can't read well, ask for help. Ask anyone. Read biographies, read business books, read self-help books, read motivational books that inspire you and academic books that interest you. Read everything you can get your hands on. And I don't mean you have to buy these books. Borrow them. Beg for them. Whatever excuse you have, believe me, I can counter it with a solution.

If you're on disability and can't work, get on the computer. Don't have a computer? Ask. People are always upgrading and you can get one for free. But you have to ask. Can't afford an internet connection? Go to a library. Go to a friend's house. Barter in exchange for using someone's computer. Don't know how to use the computer and make money with it? Ask. There are teenagers barely out of middle school making more money online than their parents who work a steady 9 to 5.

I'm not a particularly religious person. Actually, I can't say I'm religious at all. But I do know the catch-phrase 'ask and ye shall receive.' The way I interpret that is not, 'pray and ye shall get'. I interpret it as, ask yourself what you need to do to better your situation. Ask how. Ask why. Ask what. Ask and you shall receive: an answer, a solution, an inspiration, an idea, or a hand to guide you to where you want to be. But you're not going to get anywhere unless you ask and take action.

If you like where you're at in life, rich or poor, congratulations. People can go their whole life without ever feeling happy or content - regardless of their financial situation. But if you're bitching and whining about how you have nothing, know this: you are both your problem and your solution.

Clinton, TN Mansion vs a Colorado Springs, CO Mansion

When I made my pitch to Commercial Bank in Farragut TN for the Jake Butcher Mansion in Clinton, TN I was confident my proposal was solid. I still am. I felt I was at an advantage as far as knowledge about the house. I came prepared with a thorough presentation, comps, research, the entire deed history, photos of the home and, of course, my offer.

The biggest mistake the bank representative made (other than telling me the bank's bottom line) was that he told me he's also an appraiser. See, that's a problem because now I've lost all respect for the man. You cannot tell people you're an appraiser and then demonstrate how very little you know about the house and the area you're selling.

Here's the thing: the bank is upside down on the Butcher mansion. But who cares? Certainly not me. They took on a bad loan with a guy who was borrowing from bank A to pay bank B to pay bank C and so on. They were the last bank to come in on the deal and they got screwed. Not my problem. I'm looking for a deal, not a pity party.

Just because a house has a lot of square footage does not mean you're going to get a buyer willing to pay your million dollar asking price. In fact, Whirlwind's square footage is actually a negative for today's buyer. It is ridiculously expensive to maintain this home. Former Banker Jake Butcher lived there because his in-laws lived next door. He flew by helicopter to get to work in Knoxville. He was afforded such luxury because he was embezzling millions of dollars from his depositors. He went to prison, lost the home through bankruptcy, and every buyer who has taken a loan against Whirlwind since has ended up in foreclosure. It doesn't matter what your asking price is. It doesn't matter what you believe the appraised value to be. What matters is, do you have a buyer? And if that buyer is borrowing your money, can they afford the home in the long run?

Commercial Bank has a fund to pay off bad loans. When they have too many bad loans bank regulators start sniffing around. Which is another mistake the bank representative made when he said, "If we could just get the damn regulators off our back, we'd be fine." Uh-huh. I believe that's what the Butchers said once upon a time. Unfortunately for the Butchers, those "damn regulators" didn't go away.

Whirlwind is located in an area where the median household income is $35,000. It has no view, it's very close to Bull Run Steam plant - which if you know anything about my family and coal ash - you'll know I'm not a fan of coal ash. It's miles away from any restaurants, shopping or businesses, let alone cultural activities. The area has a higher tax rate than nearby, more desirable Farragut. There were 10 known meth lab quarantines in the Clinton area code for the month of April 2012. To get to the house, you have to pass homes in the $100,000 or less price range. Not that that's a bad thing, it just doesn't support Whirlwind's million dollar price tag.

And with Whirlwind, this is what you're getting...

Structural issues out the wah-zoo

missing mortar, busted drains, mold, dry rot, single-pane windows

Old-ass kitchen, trailer-esque laundry room

And are you kidding me with this bathroom?!

$1.2 million? Are you out of your freaking mind?

In contrast, this former bank-owned home in Colorado Springs sold for $1.6 million. The median household income in Colorado Springs is $108,451. The house is surrounded by homes starting in the mid-$400s up into the low millions. This particular home is in a guard-gated community in a fairly large town with lots of activites close by. Membership to the athletic club, social club and golf club were included and are within walking distance. Radiant heat floors, whole house security system, whole house surround sound, immaculate, amazing attention to detail is what the lucky investor received.

In a million dollar home, like this one, people expect to see:

Cool features like this kick-ass bar

It changes colors

Right before your eyes - and next to it: a cigar room & wine cellar

and did I mention the billiards and poker room? Well I just did.

A bath with heated floors, tv, separate vanities and SEPARATE TOILETS, ladies!

Check out that tub and behind it, an indoor-outdoor shower like you've never seen before!

Look at the detail on that ceiling!

A frickin' waterfall? Whaaat?! And it's timed to music? Get out!

Yeah, that's the kitchen and it's so big I can't even show all of it here

Or here! There's still more kitchen! I'm not kidding!

OMG! Stadium seating theater that seats 16? I have died and gone to heaven. 

This entry says to me, "Welcome to my home, bitches! Waz up?"

Even on a gloomy day, this house is gorgeous!

$1.6 million for this house is a smokin' deal! $1.2 million for the Butcher mansion is idiotic!

It's funny, the Butcher Mansion in Clinton, TN is marketed as a Tara-style, Gone with the Wind home. Sonya Butcher worked with her builder to create her vision of the fictional southern plantation. So enamored with the story, she named one of her daughter's Scarlett after the main character. The Colorado home was built by my friends Paul and Tara Rising of Tara Custom Homes. And yes, Tara's mother named her after the plantation home featured in Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer winning novel.

Alright peeps, I have things to do. More to come....

Jake Butcher Mansion: Mold Issues

One of my biggest concerns for bringing the Butcher Mansion back to a habitable condition is the cost of mold remediation. The smell of mold and mildew in this home is overwhelming. It hits you before you cross the threshold and in certain areas it constricts your throat and burns.

Thankfully, we have a hazmat professional in the family. Shortly after beginning his tour, Zack donned his hazmat suit and provided masks for all of us.

The basement, the main floor and the second floor are major problem areas. You can see where someone has attempted to clean the mold or worse, painted right over it. Whatever the case, it's bleeding through. And it's everywhere. Most of it appears to be surface mold but there are areas throughout the house, basement, and garage that are a concern for the more dangerous black mold.

The problem is, as I understand it, you have to take care of all the surface mold first. If you disturb mold, particularly black mold, the spores get airborne and attach themselves to any possible feeding surface which would be all the surface mold that currently exists in the house. Black mold spreads quickly and then you have what I like to call, "a frickin nightmare".

Mold is a big, BIG issue with the Butcher mansion. Clean-up could run five to six figures. You also have the ducts and vents to worry about. It is a massive undertaking.

Here's a little peak inside the Butcher Mansion in Clinton, TN. This video was taken from the second condo conversion on the first floor. Yes, sadly, the Butcher mansion was divided into 5 condominiums years ago but all occupants moved out, supposedly due to the high utility and maintenance bills. The house has since been vacant. The asking price remains $1.2 million and is currently held by Commercial Bank - Farragut, TN is their closest branch.



Moving on from this point we have the ballroom, also part of the second condo conversion.



What are your thoughts on the mold issue? The price of this home?

Whirlwind: Here's Why the 80s Photo of the Butcher Mansion Irks Me

Last week I posted a challenge for readers to identify why the above photos of the Butcher Mansion irk me. The post received the highest views of the week so I'm going to give you the answers, starting with the 80s photo.

One of the answers I received was from Rich who pointed out the perspective is off. I agree. The camera angle could be tweaked to get a more compelling shot, but there's so much more happening, or not happening here that really gets to me.

Here's something you may not know: when people go to real estate school, they're not taught marketing. At all. A real estate course is all about law - what you're obligated to disclose, what you should avoid saying, what an easement means to a contract, a description of various water rights, etc. There's not even a hint of how to sell a house in a real estate licensing course. And most courses can be done completely online so there's no classroom interaction where that subject could be brought up. Some Brokers teach marketing, many don't. And forget about photography, I've never seen that taught in a real estate office.

When you're marketing a home, the first thing you have to do is...

CHALLENGE: Guess Why These Whirlwind Mansion Photos Irk Me

The Butcher Mansion foyer circa 1985 and today

The foyer in the Jake Butcher mansion is the one room in the house that is in good condition. And yet, both times I was at the house last week, we never went in through the front door - we always used a side door that led into the dated kitchen of a super smelly condominium. 

When you're showing someone a house, you need to go in through the front door. It sets the stage and people decide within seconds if they're going to buy. Bringing someone in through a side door, particularly into a room that assaults the buyer's nostrils the moment they cross the threshold, is not a good idea. It puts buyers on alert and makes them wonder why they're not going through the front.

My guess is, the leaded glass window over the front door would shatter upon something so simple as entering the house and shutting the door behind you. The window bows out - in a way that I guarantee you, is not by design.

Moving on.

Every house should have at least one "wow" factor. And one of these wow factors MUST be seen the moment you walk through the front door. 

Now, you might think the wow factor is the staircase. But you see that door under the staircase? That's actually the front door. You don't see the stairwell until you're in the middle of the hall (and you turn around to see it).

There is another door directly across from the front door at the end of the grand hall. The door is all glass and used to look out to the river and valley below. Now, it looks out to the garage of the house built directly in front of the view. This is the house I call "Spite House". I'm sure the people who live there are perfectly lovely people, but they're blocking my view. And that's a huge no-no in my book.

I used to do real estate photography, staging and marketing. I'd do it again in a heartbeat because I love it. I love it more when I do it for myself, but yeah, I'd do it again for realtors. 

Because of that background, both of the photos shown here bother me. Okay, they don't just bother me, they irk the hell out of me.  Can anyone guess why they bother me? Here's a hint: there are multiple reasons.

Don't let me down, answer the question. Go with your gut. What's wrong with these photos?

The Butcher Mansion - a Retirement Home?

Q. Kathie asked: "What was all the business about a nursing/retirement home going in the Butcher Mansion? Does the man that bought it years ago still own it?"

A.The short answer is, aside from the lending institutions, there have been 3 owners: The Butchers, the Barbours and Charlie Hicks. But the long answer is a bit more complicated.

The Butchers moved into their dream home in 1974. But by 1985, Sonya Butcher was forced to sell the home due to Jake Butcher's arrest and subsequent bankruptcy.

Clifford and Dorothy Barbour picked up the home from Sonya for $800,000. The Barbours then lost the home less than eight years later to their own foreclosure (1993).

In 1993, Charlie Hicks and partners picked up the property at the Barbour's foreclosure for $621,000. Hicks and his partners subdivided the 27 acres into parcels and chopped the home into 5 condos. 

Restrictive covenants for a Home Owners Association were filed in 1994 and a condominium master deed was filed in 1997.

Though the Home Owner's Association for the neighborhood continued, the condo project was terminated 10 years after filing because...