When it comes time to sell your house, everyone wants to sell their house for what it is worth. Sometimes in a tight real estate market, you can have a bidding war and sell a house for more than its actual value, but if there is a mortgage involved, the bank will quickly bring reality to the transaction. Well, that’s the way it works for us common people.
On Sunday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported the following:
Joe Biden sold a house to a supporter for $1.2 million in 1996 – but it is only worth an estimated $1.65 million 27 years later, DailyMail.com can reveal.
The current valuation raised questions over whether Biden received an inflated price for the property from a donor nearly three decades ago.
It was purchased by an executive for a credit card company that, in the same year, also hired Biden’s son Hunter and then paid him for years.
I guess the pay-for-play started years ago.
The article notes:
During those years Joe Biden backed new bankruptcy legislation in Congress that would benefit credit card companies, even though it was opposed by a majority of Senate Democrats including Barack Obama.
At the time of the controversial house sale in 1996 a pollster for Biden’s Republican opponent in his Senate re-election race suggested that the price paid for the house had been too high.
That was vociferously denied by both Biden and MBNA.
A Biden spokesman said at the time that Biden had purchased the property when it was in a distressed state.
The spokesman said: ‘Over the 21 years that the Biden family lived in the home, they made considerable renovations.
‘There was absolutely no connection between the sale and campaign contributions or votes by Sen. Biden, and no one should dare suggest otherwise.’
MBNA also provided to the American Spectator magazine an appraisal from January 1996 that put the value of the property at $1.2 million.
However, the News Journal, a newspaper in Wilmington, went on to report that the appraisal listed as comparable properties two houses valued at just over $1 million.
Both of those properties failed to meet their asking price by more than $200,000, while Biden got the full list price.
Wow. Just wow.