Zero down for $2 million golf home, a few years to pay (in state penitentiary)

        It is one thing to dream of a luxury home in a golf community, with theater and game rooms, maybe a wine cellar, certainly a pool and let’s not leave out the Jacuzzi.  It is quite another to pursue that dream on the wrong side of the law.  Tarboro, NC’s Thomas Everette was not about to let a small thing like money stand in his way.  He broke into a $2 million foreclosed home in Raleigh’s Wakefield Plantation and stayed there for seven months until a suspicious neighbor alerted local police.

        We read about the scam courtesy of our Florida friend and fellow real estate blogger, Toby Tobin, who is on top of some of real estate’s most unusual stories. (His blog site is GoToby.com.)  According to the article in the Charlotte Observer, Everette became so comfortable in the home that he tried to set up a phony business to buy it.  Instead of nothing down and nothing to pay, the squatter could wind up paying with a few years of state-sponsored incarceration, especially since his rap sheet is allegedly 28 pages long.

        Wakefield Plantation is home to a TPC golf club purchased in recent weeks by the McConnell Group, whose portfolio of eight golf courses extends throughout the Carolinas but are concentrated mostly in the Raleigh to Greensboro corridor.  There was no evidence that the alleged perpetrator, age 31, had tried to use -- or purchase -- the golf facilities before McConnell did.

        Click here for the entire Charlotte Observer article.