The Deed Says a Name
Strawberry Mansion sits against East Fairmount Park — 33rd Street on the park side, Lehigh Avenue at the top, Sedgley Avenue and the rail line east, Cecil B. Moore toward the bottom. Ridge Avenue is not a boundary; it’s the diagonal commercial spine cutting through the middle, and half the guides online get that wrong. About 70% of the neighborhood is 19132, the rest 19121. Diamond, Susquehanna, Dauphin, Berks, Norris, Huntingdon, Cumberland — plus the small named streets that hold an enormous share of the houses and never make any guide: Oakdale, Myrtlewood, Stanley, Napa, Natrona, Harold, Gordon, Newkirk, Corlies. The neighborhood is named after the house: Historic Strawberry Mansion, built 1783–89 in the park.
Here is what makes selling here different from anywhere else on this site. In Strawberry Mansion, the most common obstacle to a sale isn’t the condition of the house. It’s whose name is on the deed.
We can put numbers on it. Roughly one in four residential parcels here has not changed hands since 1994, and about 790 houses have deeds that have not moved since 1980. In a recent city snapshot, about a third of the neighborhood’s rowhomes were behind on property taxes at a median of six years owed. Nobody with clear title and the ability to pay carries six years of arrears. That number is a portrait of estates nobody ever opened.
Citywide, Pew counted at least 10,407 homes whose deed bears a name other than the apparent owner’s — about 2% of Philadelphia’s residential properties, over $1.1 billion in family housing wealth, and by Pew’s own account an undercount. Pew published its geography by census tract, so there’s no official count for Strawberry Mansion specifically, but this neighborhood’s profile puts it squarely among the city’s highest-incidence areas. The best-known local example is the John Coltrane House, a National Historic Landmark whose restoration has been blocked by exactly this.
If you’ve lived twenty years in a house still deeded to your grandmother, you’re one of thousands, and there is a defined path out.
What the Houses Actually Are
Let’s be accurate, because marketing copy inflates this stock. The typical house here is a two-story masonry row about 15 feet wide with roughly 1,150 square feet — larger than a Port Richmond or Point Breeze row, but not a mansion.
What’s genuinely distinctive is the three-story cohort: about 730 three-story masonry rows, plus roughly 290 more already carved into flats — close to triple the proportion you’d find in the river wards. Those are the late-Victorians with bay fronts, high ceilings and deep stair halls. The best-documented run is the twelve double houses at 1907–1951 N. 32nd Street, built around 1894 by architect Angus Wade in Pompeiian brick, with pressed-metal cornices, roof crests and two-story bay windows. They’re on the National Register.
On those bigger houses the problems are the ones size creates: more low-slope roof area; bay fronts that leak first, because a bay has its own roof and flashing; three-story cornices; systems run across three floors instead of two.
Then the neighbor problem, which here is not anecdotal. A quarter of all parcels in Strawberry Mansion are vacant land — about 2,100 residential empty lots against roughly 6,400 standing rowhomes, one hole for every three houses. Roughly 370 buildings came down in the last decade, overwhelmingly city-initiated demolitions rather than developer teardowns. So many houses here are end-of-row now that were never designed to be, with an interior party wall exposed to weather.
How a Title Gets Tangled
Almost always one of these:
- Died without a will, and no one probated the estate because there was no money to.
- Died with a will, but nobody ever went to the Register of Wills — so the will transferred
- nothing on its own.
- A deed transfer was never recorded — a handshake, a rent-to-own, a payment plan with a
- private seller who died.
- Too many heirs. Grandmother had six children; four have since died leaving children of their
- own. Now nineteen people hold fractional interests and three are unreachable.
Every year adds heirs. The problem gets structurally harder, not just older.
Free Help Exists Before You Ever Talk to a Buyer
We’ll be direct, because it’s against our narrow interest to say it: if you live in the house and you’re low-income, get free legal help before you sell.
- Community Legal Services — (215) 981-3700
- Philadelphia Legal Assistance — (215) 981-3800
- SeniorLAW Center — (877) 727-7529
- Philadelphia VIP — matches cases to volunteer attorneys
Pew put the typical cost of untangling a title on a median-value home at around $9,200 without subsidized counsel, which is why the free route matters. Costs that can’t be waived, like transfer tax and legal advertising, can sometimes be covered by the city’s Tangled Title Fund.
A cleared title is worth more than any offer we could make on a clouded one: it lets you sell to anybody, refinance, or keep the house with the Homestead Exemption you’ve been unable to claim.
What We Can and Cannot Buy
- Can: a house where the estate is opened and one person holds Letters.
- Can: a house where every living heir is identified, reachable and willing to sign.
- Can: a shell, a fire, a stripped building, a caved rear ell.
- Cannot: a house where the record owner died intestate and nothing has been filed. Nobody can
- buy that — not us, not a retail buyer, not an investor promising otherwise.
We’ll look at the deed and the estate record with you and tell you which category you’re in, at no cost, before you spend anything.
The Vacant Lot Next Door
We buy vacant land here too. An inherited lot a neighbor has been mowing for fifteen years, or lots you bought in 2006 and never built on — straightforward, as-is, with the taxes owed.
(267) 507-5453
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