Philly homeowners who regularly get harassed to sell can join the city’s Do Not Solicit List

Tracey Lewis has stopped opening the text messages she receives just about every day. They’re all variations of the same: “Have you considered receiving a quote for your home?” “Can we give you a call about your property?” “I need to acquire a few more houses in Philadelphia this month.”

“Now that I’m looking, these are the main texts in my phone,” said Lewis, a homeowner in her mid-50s who has lived in Kingsessing her whole life and has spent more than two decades in her rowhouse. “I mean, this is nonstop.”

It’s not just texts from “Randy,” “Mike,” “Malia,” and the others. Lewis and her neighbors get calls at all times of day and night, postcards, letters stuck in railings and slipped in mailboxes and through front doors. But she loves her rowhouse and isn’t selling. So when Lewis heard this month that the city had rolled out a digital Do Not Solicit List for fed-up homeowners, she added her name right away.

“The harassment — it’s just too much,” she said.

Homeowners throughout the city and the region have been harassed to sell their homes for years. That harassment has picked up in the last few years as property values have soared, the supply of homes for sale has reached record lows, and historically neglected neighborhoods in Philadelphia have seen more real estate activity. In the city, many of these harassed homeowners are Black residents who are cheated out of the increased value of their properties with lowball offers.

» READ MORE: Fast-cash house flippers flood poor neighborhoods in U.S.

In mid-March, Philadelphia began allowing homeowners to go online to add themselves to the list of property owners who aren’t supposed to be contacted about selling. City officials hope the list can help chip away at the racial wealth gap by protecting Black and brown homeowners, in particular, from scams that prevent them from building and passing on wealth through their homes.

Officials and advocates believe the city is the first to compile such a list. Advocates in places such as Baltimore and Pittsburgh have contacted counterparts in Philadelphia in hopes of starting something similar.

The Do Not Solicit List is part of a series of homeowner protections the city enacted in February 2021 with input from advocates. Provisions in the law are meant to shield owners from aggressive tactics by real estate intermediaries known as “wholesalers,” who sell agreements of sale that they get homeowners to sign. The law also requires wholesalers to be licensed and to inform homeowners of their rights and options.

» READ MORE: New city law aims to crack down on real estate ‘wholesalers,’ seen as exploiting underinformed property owners

Sales agreements that homeowners sign aren’t valid if the person who got them to sign didn’t follow these practices. The protections offer a “remedy for folks who feel like they were swindled into a deal they don’t feel like is in their best interest,” said Kia Ghee, executive director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which is enforcing the Do Not Solicit List.

With the list, people who are soliciting for homes “can’t claim ignorance that they didn’t know the homeowner didn’t want to be contacted,” she said.

Even those homeowners who aren’t proactive and don’t add themselves to the list have to be left alone if they tell a solicitor they don’t want to sell, Ghee said. If messages to sell continue, owners should try to get information about the solicitor — which can be difficult — and submit a complaint to the commission, she said. People or entities who continue to solicit homeowners after they say they don’t want to sell face fines of up to $2,000 and loss of licenses.

“When you have neighborhoods that are rapidly gentrifying, you have homeowners that are sitting on their greatest asset, which in some sense is a gold mine,” Ghee said.

People who are offering below-market prices for residents’ homes are “potentially siphoning off the wealth that should be transferred to the next generation,” she said. And for Black and brown homeowners, “that just broadens the already significant racial wealth gap,” she said.

» READ MORE: Robocaller ‘Will’ really wants to buy your Philly home. Here’s what happened when we called him back.

Kingsessing, Cobbs Creek, Kensington, Sharswood, and the area around Temple University’s campus are among the neighborhoods wholesalers target, city officials and advocates say.

Lewis, the Southwest Philadelphia homeowner, hasn’t yet gotten relief from the barrage of messages, but she hopes the list can stem the tide for her and the city employees, postal workers, hairdressers, elderly residents and others in her community.

“Let homeowners decide whether they want to sell their homes or not,” she said. “Don’t try to intimidate us.”

Since summer of 2018, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, the legal aid nonprofit, has seen an uptick in clients pressured by wholesalers to sign documents selling their homes for less than the properties are worth.

“Homeowners risk losing their home at the stroke of a pen,” said Michael Froehlich, managing attorney in the home ownership and consumer rights unit at Community Legal Services. “It’s a terribly predatory industry because you have longtime homeowners who don’t realize the value of their home walking away from tens of thousands of dollars.”

Holding wholesalers accountable can be difficult. Lewis stopped trying to block phone numbers because solicitors switch them. Trying to get ahead of the problem when homeowners get new messages from new wholesalers every day “was kind of like playing whack-a-mole,” Froehlich said.

» READ MORE: I called 59 'We Buy Houses' signs searching for humans. I got secrets.

“I anticipate CLS will be representing a bunch of homeowners as we file complaints with the commission to make sure people follow the law and respect our neighborhoods,” he said.

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations has been allowing homeowners to call 215-686-4500 to join the list since last year. About 2,300 owners had signed up as of Monday evening. Given the extent of the complaints city officials have heard from homeowners, the city expects that number to grow.

“You have a lot of neighborhoods that already feel under attack,” Froehlich said. “And now they have these wholesalers swooping in trying to make a quick buck by trying to get them to sell their houses for less than they’re worth.”

This story has been updated to add the number of homeowners on the list as of Monday evening.