GULF SHORES. Ala. — Steve Jones is a Realtor by trade, but he recently participated in the sale of 17 homes, with another sale closing in a week or so, without grabbing even a smidgen of commission.

“I helped guide the city through the process, went over all the paperwork and tried to make sure all of the transactions were arm’s length and everything was transparent,” Jones, a Gulf Shores city councilman, said.

Noel Hand is not a realtor by trade. He’s the assistant public works director for Gulf Shores. But he played to role of a Realtor by managing the maintenance on the 18 houses and being available to show them to prospective buyers.

“My role was showing the houses, having the water turned on and off and the electricity and then maintaining the houses while we owned them,” Hand said. “Keep the yards cut, just watching over the houses.”

The pair combined skills to help the city sell the 18 houses that were on the north side of flood-prone 21st Avenue East. Former residents and owners sued the city and the city paid $883,000 to 24 plaintiffs and part of that settlement included the city buying the houses.

After the upcoming closing, the houses will all be sold within seven months of the city taking the properties over.

Thanks in large part to the work of Jones and Hand.

“So there’s two guys who did a tremendous job for this city keeping up with them, keeping the grass mowed, keeping them maintained and managing the sales on his own time, no commissions,” Mayor Robert Craft said at Monday’s council meeting. “This is a councilman who has given us his all and we sold every one of them.”

Of Hand, Craft said, “What a great job he did keeping those homes up to date and inspecting them.”

And while the city didn’t recoup all its money – officials weren’t expecting too – the houses were not sold at bargain basement prices either.

“We were committed to protecting those values over there and not let that area become a depressed market,” Jones said. “What we did was a market analysis on recent homes that had sold and established a pricing structure for the homes over there that would allow them to be sold as close to market value as we could get. And that’s what we did.”

Councilwoman Carolyn Doughty, also a Realtor, said selling at deep discount prices just to get rid of the homes would have been a detriment to the whole neighborhood.

“We maintained the property values for those people over there and that was our goal,” she said.

Some of the homes were sold at a bit of a discount based some work needing to be done on them.

“Some of them would have required more repairs, a lot of them might have needed some sheetrock work, some needed some painting,” Jones said. “We tried to assign prices to those houses to reflect those things, but still without having a fire sale. That’s a plan we established and we stuck through with the whole process.”

The flooding problems that prompted the lawsuit have been addressed in a number of ways. Two outfall drainage ditches leading to the Intracoastal Waterway have been widened, cleaned and given bigger culverts under roadways. A new ditch connecting those ditches is nearly complete as well.

“We made all those improvements in the east to that drainage situation over there where that will probably never happen again,” Jones said. “You can’t guarantee the properties won’t flood again, but the improvements that we’ve made reduce the likelihood of that happening tremendously.

“I wouldn’t be hesitant to say that if it floods over there it’s going to flood a lot of other places, too, because we’ve added so much additional drainage.”

Jones said the new owners have taken pride in their purchases.

“That’s a great little neighborhood,” he said. “A lot of the new homeowners have really done a lot of cleanup on those properties. Most of them look a lot better than they ever have. The quality and curb appeal of that whole street have improved, in my view, 100 percent because the people that have made those purchases have done a great job cleaning up their properties.

“I’m just real proud of the way the things have turned out.”