TLCF 2012A LLC of Philadelphia
The company bought 103 tax-delinquent properties from Muncie. Owners have the chance to buy them back for one year. After that, TLCF 2012A LLC can sell the properties for a profit. The company is known for leaving properties abandoned that they cannot make a profit on.
•A company that bought 103 properties in Delaware County may have allowed some of the building to become unsafe to live in.
•The company, TLCF 2012A LLC of Philadelphia, buys the properties and then sells or rents them back to the original owners.
•Many of the unsafe properties could take more than three years to enter a new tax-sale process.
MUNCIE — A Muncie official says she’s worried that the chances of several houses being repaired have been hurt because of their purchase by a company that buys tax-delinquent properties.
The company — TLCF 2012A LLC of Philadelphia — bought 103 properties around Delaware County at an October tax sale for about $290,000. The previous owners can repay the company and recover those properties within a year, but the city has declared a dozen of the houses as unsafe to occupy, The Star Press reported.
Gretchen Cheesman, director of the city’s unsafe building hearing authority, said she believed the company would walk away from many of the houses and that it could take more than three years for a new tax-sale process.
“There’s no way they could have even driven by these houses,” she said. “Judging by the properties they purchased and the prices they paid, I don’t know how they could have. They haven’t secured the properties or cleaned up the trash or mowed them. Several are standing open.”
Company representative Scott Smith said it doesn’t spend the money to check out all the properties that it buys at tax sales, instead mainly gathering information online.
The company, which often sells or rents the properties back to the original owners, spent about $7 million at five tax sales throughout Indiana during a 10-day period last fall, he said. Counties make money off the process.
“We get bad properties all the time,” Smith said. “It’s the cost of doing business. We do our best. It’s not the perfect way of doing things.”
One of the houses Smith’s company bought on the south side of Muncie recently had snow drifting into the front room from a wide-open door. Its last owner died in 2006.
Betty Montgomery, a retiree who lives next door to the house, said it has been vacant for at least three years and is worthless.
“It’s about ready to fall down,” she said. “The roof is falling in, and it stands open all the time.”
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