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Avoiding Snake Oil: Research Your Investments!
I would have been stuck with snakes, snakes, snakes, for as long as I owned the property!

Recently I was asked if I was interested in investing in some luxury condos to be built in an apparently scenic area in a small southern town, Wilmington, NC. There was said to be a river view and close access to local hot spots - in fact, the project was being built in a historic downtown. The photos looked fantastic and it sounded just wonderful....until I investigated for myself.

As I've said in previous columns, the smart senior has to manage her investments carefully. A promising prospect on paper can turn out to be a bunch of "snake oil" once you investigate in person. I decided to take a quiet trip down to the Wilmington, North Carolina Cape Fear riverfront to take a look at the neighborhood.

I discovered that just next door was the creepiest, crawliest place in the world!

A zoological museum calling its Cape Fear Serpentarium housed over a thousand examples of the world's most dangerous snakes! Enough venom, and enough snakes, boasted their banners, to kill 23,580 people every single day! The Serpentarium is well aware of its noxiousness and freely boasts this advertisement.

My investment informant did everything they could to convince me that "it was perfectly safe" but I must say, I left feeling unconvinced. What, in the world, I wondered, would they do in the next hurricane? What would we do, living next door? Would black mambas be turning up in our beds at night? Would spitting cobras be popping up in our toilets? Would bushmaster snakes be waiting for us on our doorsteps at night when we stepped outside? Each one of these snakes can kill 20 or more people with a single nip! Even if I didn't live there personally, how could I hope to resell my investment when the time came? There must be better places to put your money.

Seeing my state of nerves, my informant assured me that the Serpentarium was only temporary, that he "knew for a fact" they were going out of business - so not to worry.

So I went and looked for myself. It was Saturday, off-season, and the place was standing room only! With crowds like this, it didn't look like it was going out of business to me! I met the owner and it turned out he had been breeding poisonous snakes in the Wilmington area for over 30 years!

He isn't going anywhere, he says. His business is great! In fact they have already expanded (by way of a spooky looking tunnel) into a neighboring building and have plans to spread more snakes to a now vacant lot on the corner, which they have just purchased. I asked him what the reason was for snake popularity. "People love to look at things that can kill them," he said, "deadly snakes, spiders, scorpions, you name it." And added this proviso, "Provided they get to go home from them afterwards".

Were his snakes fully venomous, I asked. Absolutely, he said. He himself had been bitten 11 times, four times nearly fatally, and once literally brought back from the dead! And he had more than a thousand of these monsters on the premises, ranging from deadly little adders the size of a pencil (I could picture them stowing away in my pocket book as I hurried out) to king cobras as long as a car! The place was a giant reproduction facility for the world's most dangerous creatures!

It turned out the "going out of business story" was just a fabrication of the developer, who was panicking that he might not be able to sell his project.

I was glad I listened to the old rule: "Go out and look at the property before you buy!" There were a few too many "snakes in the grass" in this "snake oil" investment for me to risk putting my precious retirement money down.

I kept thinking about what the snake man had said. "People love to look at deadly snakes . . . provided they get to go home from them afterwards." Or don't have to sleep next to them, I reflected. And then I realized that if I lived in a unit next door, I would never be able to go home from snakes ever again! They would be right there, just outside my window! They would be in my mind night and day, reinforced by the image of a huge snake's head on the side of the building, replete with dripping fangs! I couldn't invite people over without making horrible excuses. I would be stuck with snakes, snakes, snakes, for as long as I owned the property. And anyone else I sold to would be stuck as well.

"Put yourself in the buyer's shoes," they told us in real-estate school. I decided I wouldn't like to be in such slimy shoes! I left, telling my informant, "Well, good luck on all that!"

Live next to a house full of deadly snakes? No thanks. I'd rather buy swamp land.

In fact, a contingent of local residency owners, appalled at the idea of falling property values, have already approached the Serpentarium about the issue. The Serpentarium's reply was a simple, "We were here first. If some real-estate con man bilked you, take it up with him! Next time do your homework before you buy!" The Serpentarium's website mocks these duped individuals.

And that's the story of my narrow escape from real estate investment hell in Wilmington, North Carolina.

They're turning buildings like this one into luxury condominiums. Some luxury! Next door to the world's largest collection of deadly venomous snakes! Want to live there?