‘Little slice of hell’ home sold for undisclosed price

Colorado Springs’ “little slice of hell” home has sold to a buyer that grew up two streets away.

“She’s very excited. She lives in the neighborhood, so she loves the area,” real estate agent Mimi Foster said.

The contract for the home at 4525 Churchill Court will close on July 9, which is when Foster said the buyer would disclose how much the house is being sold for.

Foster said the buyer looked forward to getting it “back to a beautiful home,” and was planning on documenting the house’s gradual renovation as it progressed. After it’s fixed up, Foster said the buyer plans on reselling the house.

The south Colorado Springs nightmare home first gained attention last week when Foster listed the house as “every landlord’s nightmare,” after a disgruntled former tenant vandalized the home with profane graffiti and a hammer, and left rancid meat in an unpowered basement freezer for over a year.

In a Redfin listing posted on Tuesday, Foster said the five-bedroom, four-bathroom home would need “someone with firm resolve to appreciate its potential.”

That nightmare was the result of angry vandalism on the part of a former tenant who thought she owned the home, Foster said, as well as the decomposed remains of several cats, some stuffed into a freezer that was left without power for months.

“It’s so horrific,” she said.

The vandalism came after the homeowner handed the house off to a property manger following several months in which the tenant failed to pay rent. That property manager evicted the tenant in October 2019, Foster said.

The tenant was let back into the home by the property manager shortly after she was kicked out. That’s when the vandalism happened, Foster said.

“She painted over furniture, she took hammers to everything,” she said.

Some vandalism has occurred in and outside the house since the fall of 2019, Foster said, referencing a damaged fence she thought had been jumped over and a window that was broken in the last month.

Despite all that’s been done to the house, Foster said the property still has many good qualities.

“Oh my gosh, it’s beautiful,” Foster said. “It’s in a beautiful location, with views of the city.”

The house was sold in its current condition because the homeowner can’t cover the repairs herself and hasn’t been able to get her insurance company to pay for the damages, which Foster said several contractors estimated at around $150,000.

Foster said earlier that the client isn’t happy about all of the attention around a house she just wants to get sold.

“The seller was not happy,” Foster said about the listing she posted for the home. “She thought it was too flippant to get any interest.”