Town of High River makes $1.8 million on home sales

Sometimes you just get lucky.

That's what happened last spring and summer when the Town of High River sold off 14 residential properties in the northwest that it had bought back from the Province.

Mayor Craig Snodgrass says everything just fell into line.

"It was something that when we first presented this to the province that we would like to buy the houses back, we all knew that there was a possibility that we would take a loss on some of these houses but we were okay with that risk because we wanted to get them back into private ownership and get those neighbourhoods, get those houses and retain those neighbourhoods rather than have these houses demolished," he says. 

"That was a lot of work, that was ten years from day one that we fought to keep those houses and three governments later we finally got it done, but it was sure a nice little boost at the end of the day when we nailed the housing market the way we did, it wasn't on purpose it was just a fluke and some things turn out the right way at the right time and this did so realizing a profit of over $1.8-million is absolutely fantastic and now council's discussing how to put that money back into the community."

He says councils agreed it wouldn't be going into general revenue and there are still a lot of projects around town that could use some cash.

Snodgrass adds that some people moved into their homes right away and started renovations and some are doing it themselves so it may take a little longer but it's nice to see it moving forward.

A lot of the credit for the success of the sale, he says, goes to Jessica Geisbrecht who's been working on the project with the mayor right from the beginning along with Jodie Hipkin and Kieren and Shawna with their videos of the homes, and administration who really knocked it out of the park.

He says two of the provincial governments weren't keen on the idea of selling the homes back to the Town because it was too difficult for them to rewind their original buyout of the homeowners after the 2013 flood but the town was able to save the Province millions of dollars in the end in demolition and land rejuvenation costs.