Who Owns Akron's Condemned Houses? 2024-2026 Data Study

Every month, Akron's Housing Appeals Board votes on a list of houses the Housing Compliance Division says are too far gone to save. Most get ordered demolished with the cost charged back to the owner. We pulled every property the board acted on between August 2024 and August 2026 and matched each one to Summit County Fiscal Office records to answer a question nobody had put numbers on: who actually owns these houses, where do they live, and what do they owe?

Key findings

81% of houses ordered demolished were tax delinquent at the time of the order. 97% owed something.
$568,206 in unpaid property taxes is sitting on 37 condemned houses. Median balance: $7,509. Among the delinquent ones: $12,122.
Two houses owe more than they are worth. 367 Hillwood Dr (West Akron) owes $57,768 against a $58,500 appraisal. 949 Dover Ave (West Akron) owes $56,025 against $54,330.
59% are absentee-owned. The tax bill mails somewhere other than the house.
84% are owned by individuals, not companies. Only 6 of 37 are LLCs or trusts. But 5 of those 6 are out of state (California, Florida, New York, Maryland). Not one individual owner is out of state.
32% still receive the owner-occupancy tax credit on a house the city has declared vacant and unfit. Nine of those twelve are also delinquent.
89% were built before 1930. Median year built: 1919. The oldest, 1024 Yale St in Summit Lake, dates to 1893.
29 of 37 have been in the same hands 20+ years or have no recorded sale at all. These are not failed flips. They are houses that were inherited, or held for decades, and then left.

Where the houses are

Bar chart of 48 Akron houses ordered demolished by neighborhood, led by South Akron and Summit Lake with 8 each. — Houses ordered demolished by the Akron Housing Appeals Board, August 2024 to August 2026. South Akron and Summit Lake account for a third of all orders.

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Houses ordered razed, median tax balance, and total owed by neighborhood:

South Akron: 8 houses, median $5,139, total $91,644
Summit Lake: 8 houses, median $15,017, total $97,732
East Akron: 7 houses, median $9,149, total $77,542
Middlebury: 6 houses, median $6,308, total $12,616
Sherbondy Hill: 5 houses, median $6,825, total $54,866
West Akron: 5 houses, median $39,576, total $139,177
Kenmore: 3 houses, median $7,206, total $41,893
Goodyear Heights: 2 houses, median $7,134, total $14,267
University Park: 2 houses, median $11,851, total $11,851
Highland Square: 1 house, $26,618 owed
North Hill: 1 house, no county match

Median and total figures use houses with matched county records; the counts include all houses ordered razed.

South Akron and Summit Lake lose the most houses. West Akron loses fewer but carries the heaviest debt per house, driven by the two properties owing more than $55,000 each.

Bar chart showing 31 of 37 condemned Akron houses are owned by individuals with Ohio addresses, 5 by out-of-state companies or trusts, and 1 by an Ohio company. — Ownership of 37 condemned houses with county records. Individuals with Ohio addresses own 31; five of the six company-owned houses are held from out of state.

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The out-of-state question

At its August 2026 meeting, a board member objected to spending city money to demolish a house owned by an out-of-state corporation. The records show that concern is real but narrow. Company-owned condemned houses are rare (6 of 37), and when a company does own one it is almost always based somewhere else:

949 Dover Ave, West Akron: SEG Commercial LLC, Mission Viejo, CA. Owes $56,025.
495 Sumner St, University Park: Velerka LLC, Hewlett, NY. Owes $11,851.
1355 Hart St, East Akron: a land trust administered from Fresno, CA. Owes $7,267.
905 Hunt St, East Akron: Atlas 360 Prime LLC, St. Petersburg, FL. Owes $4,288.
506 Campbell St, Sherbondy Hill: Vamaga Enterprises LLC, Silver Spring, MD. Paid current; the owner volunteered the demolition.

The larger pattern is local. Thirty-one of the 37 houses belong to individuals, every one with an Ohio mailing address, and most of them still in Akron. The typical condemned house is not an investor's mistake. It is a century-old house that stayed in a family long after anyone was living in it.

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The owner-occupancy credit

Ohio gives owner-occupants a 2.5% rollback on their property tax bill. Twelve of the 37 condemned houses still carry that credit on the county's books, even though the city's own inspectors describe them as vacant. On 367 Hillwood Dr, the December 2025 tax bill shows both the owner-occupancy rollback and the homestead reduction still being applied against a $51,959 delinquent balance. We are not suggesting anyone is doing anything wrong; the credit stays on until someone removes it. But it is a sign of how long these houses sit between "nobody lives here" and "the county knows nobody lives here."

Bar chart of unpaid property taxes on 37 condemned Akron houses, totaling $568,206, with three houses each owing more than $54,000 and a median of $7,509. — Unpaid property taxes on each of 37 condemned houses. Three West Akron and Summit Lake properties each owe more than $54,000.

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What happens to the money

When the city demolishes a house, the cost is assessed to the property taxes. Housing Administrator Duane Groeger told the board in August that the city has no other mechanism to recover demolition costs from an owner. So the demolition bill lands on top of the existing delinquency, on a lot that is now worth less than the house was. In most cases the eventual path is a tax foreclosure and a transfer to the Summit County Land Bank. The half million dollars in unpaid taxes documented here is, for practical purposes, already gone.

Methodology

Source of cases. Signal Akron's Documenters program publishes a written record of most Akron Housing Appeals Board meetings, listing each property by address and neighborhood with the board's action. We scraped every Documenters write-up tagged "Akron Housing Appeals Board" published between August 2024 and August 2026 (nine meeting records) and extracted 74 unique properties. Houses that appeared at more than one meeting were counted once, with their final outcome. Of the 74, the board ordered 48 razed; the rest received extensions, were removed from the agenda, or were appeals of repair orders rather than demolition cases.

County records. Each address was looked up on the Summit County Fiscal Office property portal (propertyaccess.summitoh.net) in September 2026. We recorded the owner of record, the tax-bill mailing address, owner-occupancy credit status, year built, appraised value, sale history, and the delinquent and current balances shown on the Taxes Due tab. Thirty-seven of the 48 razed houses matched a county parcel; 11 did not return a usable match on address search and are excluded from the ownership and tax figures, but included in the neighborhood counts.

Definitions. "Absentee" means the tax-bill mailing address differs from the property address. "Tax delinquent" means a prior-year balance greater than zero. "Company-owned" means the owner of record is an LLC, corporation, or trust. Owner names for individuals are public record but are not reproduced here.

Limitations. Documenters do not cover every meeting, so this is a sample of board actions, not a complete census. County balances change daily. Appraised values are the county's, not market values. With 37 houses in the tax analysis, percentages should be read as strong signals rather than precise rates.

The full dataset is available on request. Questions: contact West Hill Home Buyers.

West Hill Home Buyers is a local, family-owned company that buys houses in Akron and Summit County for cash, renovates them, and keeps them as rentals. We built this study because we spend our days inside houses like the ones on this list, and we wanted to understand how they got there.

Who Owns Akron's Condemned Houses? Two Years of Housing Appeals Board Records