Clean-up is just the first step Suppose there was a murder at your house. Suppose, for the sake of keeping you in this hypothetical situation, it was the murder-suicide of a couple that was renting it from you, which has made you understandably keen on getting rid of the place. If you were serious about receiving anything close to market value for it, you would call someone like Randall Bell.
Bell, who runs an appraisal firm specializing in real estate damage economics, can count the Boulder home where JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, the Rancho Sante Fe mansion where the Heaven's Gate cult committed mass suicide, and Nicole Brown Simpson's Los Angeles condo among the appraised properties on his very morbid CV. Profiled last year by the LA Times for evaluating a Las Vegas home plagued by rumors of cult activity, he also consulted on the World Trade Center site in New York City, and the field in Pennsylvania where United Airlines Flight 93 went down. Bell spends much of his time traveling to disaster areas and former crime scenes, either to work as a consultant for property owners there or to gather data to better advise a client in a similar situation. Here, gleaned from a phone interview, are what might be called the best practices of hawking stigmatized properties.
Clean thoroughly.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but Bell once worked a case where, after a family had moved into their new home, the daughter found a bullet hole in her closet. The fa...