132 Newhall St. at Saturday's foreclosure auction.
A Newhallville two-family house that was built a decade ago by a local affordable homeownership nonprofit will soon be owned by the federal government — and then put out for sale again — after no bidders showed up to the property’s foreclosure auction.
That bidder-less “auction” took place Saturday at noon outside of 132 Newhall St.
Because no bidders showed up to try to buy the Newhall Street property Saturday, the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) will take ownership.
CHFA is the quasi-public organization that issues low-interest loans to low- and moderate-income Connecticut residents looking for help buying their own homes. According to state court records, First Niagara Bank assigned 132 Newhall St.‘s mortgage to CHFA in 2014. CHFA then moved to foreclose on that mortgage in June 2019 after the previous owner defaulted on his loan payments.
CHFA Managing Director of Administration Maura Martin told the Independent that foreclosed property will now be turned over to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The city assessor’s database, meanwhile, shows that the two-family house itself is roughly a decade old, and was built by the local affordable homeownership nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (NHS), which purchased the property from the city in 2000.
NHS is a nonprofit that seeks to make homeownership more accessible in the city by buying derelict and vacant properties throughout New Haven, building new or restoring existing homes on those properties, and then selling them at affordable rates to owner-occupants who earn 80 percent or less of the area median income (AMI).
NHS Executive Director Jim Paley.
According to NHS Executive Director Jim Paley, “No more than a handful of people have lost homes that they purchased from [NHS] in foreclosure” across NHS’s many years of work in the city.
“I was heartbroken to learn of the foreclosure,” Paley said about 132 Newhall St. “I remember vividly during the open house standing with [the owner]’s son in what was to become his bedroom and how proud he was as we looked out the window of his new home and new bedroom.”
Bridgette Russell, managing director of NHS’s Home Ownership Center, said that, once the federal government takes ownership of the property, it will likely put the house on the market for its appraised value of $330,000, rather than at discounted rate. That’s because “the market is still robust for multifamily [homes] in New Haven,” she said.
On Saturday outside of 132 Newhall St., the court-appointed lawyers who oversaw the bidder-less auction speculated that the relatively high appraised value of the home may have deterred potential buyers from coming out to the sale.
The lawyers, who declined to be identified for this article but whom court records show work for the local law firm Esposito & Annunziata, said it is not uncommon for no bidders to show up to an auction. They also said that they have recently hosted foreclosure auctions with “up to 13 or 14 bidders” for a single property.
The Newhall Street property’s former owner did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the publication time of this article.