Meanwhile, home values have begun to rise again in Fairfield. The average sale price of a home was $140,732 in 2009, and that number declined until 2011, when the value was 129,390, according to the Hamilton-Fairfield-Oxford Board of Realtors. However, the sale price went back up in 2012 to $131,456.
John Holbrock, the president of that board said, “Whether you’re a buyer, a seller, or a Realtor, things are improving.”
Fairfield recently completed a program called NEAT (Neighborhood Enforcement Action Team), which conducted inspections of every single-family home in the city between 2009 and 2012, said Tim Bachman, the city’s director of development. Five percent of those inspections had violations. The overall goal of the program was to keep property values up during the recession.
In the NEAT program, city employees would conduct proactive inspections of homes, reporting items to the owner such as missing downspouts, overgrowth or faulty roofing/siding or junk cars, said Brian Jump, one of the inspectors. If a home was found to be in violation, the property owner was given a set amount of time to fix it, with the schedule flexible depending on personal circumstances.
“Property maintenance was and still is a pretty significant goal of city council … we’re certainly not immune to the housing crunch in Fairfield. With that comes issues of people not maintaining their properties and, frankly, property values going down in various neighborhoods. Council was very cognizant of that and wanted to step that portion of what we do up,” Bachman said.
One of the reasons violations took a drop from 3,538 in 2009 to 1,983 in 2010 was that the former Heritage Glen apartments on Pleasant Avenue contributed to a significant amount of the violations. That complex has since been remodeled by new owners, Bachman said.
Fairfield is beginning a new round of NEAT inspections this spring, with the goal of having 10,000 homes inspected within four years, at 2,500 homes a year.
“We used to get a lot of phone calls from a lot of people about issues that they had that weren’t resolved. Those have cut down significantly, and I think that’s because we’re much more proactive in terms of finding issues,” Bachman said.
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