Revamped tool helps Detroiters track speculators

This story is part of The Speculators of Detroit, which looks at how bad actors have destabilized neighborhoods, left many residents without safe housing and cost the city hundreds of millions.

Tracking and identifying speculators - the people who buy up properties across Detroit neighborhoods and abandon them until the right buyer comes along - is notoriously difficult. An updated tool makes it much easier.

Property Praxis catalogs speculation in Detroit by identifying people who own 10 or more neglected properties. The website identifies people associated with speculative properties across the city for every year from 2015-24. Users can search by address, ZIP code or owner, and see results on a map.

The information is public, and users can download all the data for free.

"We built this for community," said Alex Hill, one of the project's founders. "It was just a constant community ask and a gap in information that people didn't have."

Hill, the founder of Detroitography and an adjunct professor at Wayne State University, and Joshua Akers, a former University of Michigan-Dearborn professor, started the project in 2016.

Outlier Media launched a series last month examining speculation and its effects on Detroit. The relaunch of Property Praxis is an essential resource to understand how the profit-seeking practice has changed since real estate prices skyrocketed in recent years.

Detroit's top speculator for every year since 2016 is John Hantz, owner of the controversial Hantz Woodlands on the eastside. He currently owns 1,473 properties. That's about 50% more than the Moroun family, which owns the second-highest number of speculative properties.

Other big speculators include Salameh Jaser, Dennis Kefallinos, Michael Kelly, Stephen Hagerman and Melvin Washington.

Property Praxis has been dormant since 2020, but Hill and another researcher picked the project back up earlier this year.

It's a true labor of love - or, as Hill likes to say, "obligation." The lead researchers have all worked on the project alongside full-time jobs.

Hill and others pull data from the city assessor's office on Sept. 1 every year. They then identify owners of 10 or more properties. If the listed owner is a company and not an individual, they sift through city documents, state licensing paperwork and even LinkedIn to uncover the people behind the business name.

Many of the same speculators show up year after year. But properties are always changing hands, and new buyers are constantly trying to enter Detroit's real estate market.

The process doesn't always result in a slam-dunk identification. Property owners can hide behind limited liability companies, real estate attorneys or registering services to make it difficult or even impossible to know who's really behind a company.

Defining what makes a speculative property is also somewhat subjective. Property Praxis researchers spot-check addresses using Google Street View, Mapillary and other sources like blight tickets and U.S. Postal Service data, which can show if a property is occupied.

"The intention is to capture as many as we can, as best as we can," Hill said. "And this gets us to our best possible data set given the limitations."

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