A report from the Houston Chronicle in Texas. "These investors fix and flip, and the faster they sell a home, the lower their holding costs and the greater their profit. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But two years after Harvey, dozens of investor-bought homes remain vacant, standing in various combinations of repair and neglect. In one Wimbledon Champions home, a newly renovated breakfast bar overlooked a pool half-filled with emerald green water - where the pool filter should have been lay a nest of disconnected pipes."

"Investors raised more than $1 billion to invest in damaged Houston homes in the wake of Harvey, much of it in the form of so-called 'hard money' loans. Wimbledon Champions, where more than 165 of the community’s 1,100 homes sold after the hurricane, was one of the most impacted neighborhoods. Kevin Johnson, a Wimbledon Champions homeowner who stopped working for six months as he restored his home was puzzled by the condition of a house around the corner. Eventually, he paid his own landscaper to tend the yard."

"'It was horrendous,' he said. 'I think the owner just walked away from it.'"

"He was right, in a way. The owner who had walked away was not the family that had lived in the home for a quarter century before the storm. It was Home Today Inc., a crisis investor based outside Las Vegas. Home Today didn’t walk away from just one home. It walked away from dozens. In the six months after the disaster, the company bought 72 homes in Harris County, according to documents from the Harris County Appraisal District, making it one of the top buyers of Harvey-flooded homes. Two years later, 61 of those homes had entered foreclosure."

"The Nevada company has been sued by contractors, who claim to be owed $195,000. Harris County and the Spring Independent School District have also sued, saying they were owed a cumulative $34,343.85. Home Today’s lenders have been trying to recoup $15.7 million they lent the company."

"Representatives of Home Today, which calls itself a nonprofit on its website, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails."

"The company was not alone in its troubles. Many investors hoping to find gold in the floodwaters instead found themselves dragged into the same mire of financial troubles faced by homeowners throughout the region. And because many bought at scale, their difficulties had an outsized impact on communities. More than 150 homes purchased by investors within six months of the disaster have entered foreclosure, data from Foreclosure Information and Listing Service shows."

"Home Today was able to borrow more than $11 million from LendingHome, a San Francisco company despite reporting just $622,000 in revenue the year before. Home Today then moved on to other lenders, borrowing $3 million from Civic, a lender based in Redondo Beach, Calif., then another $14.5 million from Anchor Loan, a lender from Calabasas, Calif."

"The lenders said repaired homes sat on the market for longer than Home Today had expected. When sales are slow, an investor’s costs add up. Every month a property remains unsold means an additional a month’s worth of taxes, insurance, utilities, homeowner association fees and landscaping costs eating into the bottom line. Selling quickly is especially important for investors who take out loans, which often come with double-digit interest rates."

"Investors that walked away from unprofitable properties left houses in a type of purgatory as the community around them tries to heal. Others have stuck by their investments despite unforeseen costs. One was Fred Farah, who bought more than two dozen homes in the area, hoping that the market would recover within a year and a half or so, allowing him to make a profit of 20 percent to 30 percent."

"But despite updating the homes, Farah, who did not bankroll his purchases with hard-money loans, has had a hard time finding buyers. After listing one home for more than 100 days, he decided to start looking for renters. 'I put it on the market in March,' he said. 'Customers — when they hear ‘flooded,’ they’re not listening to buy.'"

"Further complicating sales efforts, sellers who have to contend with the stigma of flooded homes also are dealing with competition from other investor-owned houses in the same neighborhood. Because so many homes turned over at the same time, there’s a bumper stock of renovated homes on the market."

"Meantime, holding costs have eaten away Farah’s profits. He has offloaded some of the homes to other investors, who are renting them out. And to stanch his hemorrhaging costs on the remaining homes, he has rented those out as well, becoming a landlord — something he never intended. He wasn’t alone. Only seven Wimbledon Champions homes had been listed for lease on the Houston Association of Realtors website in the two years before Harvey. In the two years after, that number increased to 49."

"Meanwhile, Farah still hopes the market will go up enough to make the homes worth selling after the leases are up. 'Maybe one more year,' he said. 'Maybe the prices go up and people forget the hurricane there. You still have a chance.'"