It’s a cautionary tale.
Man likes house. Man buys house. Man discovers the driveway is sold separately – and it did, to someone else.
“Normally I mean common sense, every house that has a driveway, you think when you’re buying it, you're buying that driveway with it,” said Shakeel Cheema, a longtime local businessman but first-time bidder at the city’s auction of tax foreclosure properties.
“But there is always first for everything in life.”
The house was among 460 tax foreclosed properties the city took to auction earlier this month – the first such auction since before the pandemic. More than 500 bidders showed up.
“The room was packed,” said Dana Miller, the city’s commissioner of neighborhood and business development. “I was very much kind of looking at that and saying, gee, this is very much like the last auction we had in 2019.”
The Rochester Land Bank Corp., an arm of the city that assembles land for future development, got first dibs and took 55 properties. Another 216 went to individual bidders, mostly individual bidders like Cheema in the immediate Rochester area.
Because the city always enters the first bid, in the amount of the unpaid tax bill, the remaining 148 went to the city.
Cheema, a Pittsford resident, beat out multiple bidders for 1 Denning St., with a high bid of $150,000.
“That's a very high number, both for that area, and for houses in general in the auction,” Miller said.
The two-and-a-half story house sits on a short, dead-end street overlooking Interstate 490, south of downtown Rochester. It is the only house on the street.
Winning bidders must put down a deposit of $5,000, which was raised from a previous $1,000 this year in the hopes of ensuring serious bidders. As Cheema went to put down his deposit, he heard the auctioneer call out another Denning Street address.
“They auctioned off number three,” he said. “And I couldn't even imagine what it was, number three.”
Three, it turned out, includes the blacktopped driveway that runs alongside the house. It’s a fragment of a lot – one of hundreds along this stretch of 490 – leftovers from when the state built the highway in the 1950s and ‘60s. The city has been slowly working to unload them ever since.
Just a month or so ago, City Council OK’d the sale of a couple of other small remnants on Harvard Street; 10-foot sections or thereabouts behind the back yards of a couple of houses there.
"There are literally hundreds of these little remnant parcels,” Miller said.
The current owner of 1 Denning Street bought the driveway lot from the city for $1 nearly a decade ago, but never paid to combine the two. Cheema argues the city should have flagged the issue at the time of the auction. He would have bought both. Miller notes that bidders are encouraged to research the properties they are bidding on, and a simple online search would have identified the issue on Denning.
The winning bid for 3 Denning was $7,000. Cheema says the bidder, who he understood to be an out-of-town investor, brushed him off at the auction.
“They said, ‘No, we can use it as a garage,” he said. “Yeah, I mean, how are you going to use it as a garage? Where are you going to rent this one garage? So, they are just playing games.”
Cheema went ahead with the purchase, not wanting to forfeit his deposit and figuring there was still street parking if no deal on the driveway can be reached.
A city spokeswoman declined to identify the buyer of 3 Denning St., noting the sale is not yet final.
The auction brought in $9 million, if all bidders make good on their commitments. The money first goes toward settling back taxes, mortgage defaults and other debts. Whatever is left on each property goes to the previous owner.