So how do I take a chance on this?
 

A few years ago I was wandering around a West Vancouver neighborhood while waiting for a friend and among other things I found there was a house a few blocks away that had suffered a fire a number of years earlier and had been sitting boarded up ever since. Well one of the back windows had their plywood pulled off and sure, lets take a peek inside. :smoke:
Aside from your usual fire damaged home that had already been ransacked by transients, there was a console set in the basement living room. It was facing the wall and there was too much trash to pull it away and see what the front looked like but I distinctly recall that both the back was still securely on the set and the base cover was the triangular type which I think means it's a color tri-gun set? It could be a CTC, it could be a Zenith. I could be mixing things up and it's a mid-80's Electrohome. Worth a second look, even if it's for parts at this point.
So here's the deal. If it is such an older set it might be worth saving but in the time since I last snuck in they've gone and redone the plywood on all the windows and doors and I'm not sure how to explain to the new owner how I know there's a potentially desireable set in the basement since it's in a room with no windows and I never knew who lived there.

What do? Let this one pass?

First, I'm wondering how you know who to contact, or are you waiting until you see someone there?

I think the most I would say is "I collect old radios and TVs, and if there's anything in there you want to get rid of, here's my contact info."

If you do a quick search Zenith neck cones, RCA neck cones, and clone set cones were triangular in the roundy era. RCA/clones also briefly used a triangular cone on rectangular sets that was basically their roundy cone made more shallow. Both RCA and Zenith cones have a step to them. Zenith cones taper in to a smaller point. Both are distinctive from each other.

So what I gather from my friend's mom is that she knows the neighborhood and does talk to the property owner from time to time, though it's been a few years, so there is a contact option there, somehow.
They have not lived in the house for a number of years. The fire initially happened back in 2016 but they had vacated the house before even that. It's a tough one, because even to ask *if* there's anything like that inside, they might not know themselves, given the context.

Maybe mention that you saw a post about it on an urban exploration forum. If they ask to see the topic just say it got taken down because it mentioned the address.

How about just come right out and tell them that when some of the plywood covering the windows had blown down you looked in and saw an old console TV, your hobby is fixing up old TVs, and that you'd be willing to give them a few dollars for it depending on what model it is ? I wouldn't go into the whole rare & valuable thing, I'll bet they'd be happy to have one less thing to have to pay to have taken to the dump... :thmbsp:

That might actually work. There is a somewhat active urbex community in Vancouver since there are so many abandoned foreign owned and rezoned commercial properties. I'll give that a try next time I'm in town.

I truly wish you well with getting it, provided it turns out to be something worth keeping :thmbsp:

What luck. The property has been sold again.
So now it's under ownership of a development firm who is working to clear the block. This sounds like it might be better but I've had terrible luck communicating with property development firms. They don't answer emails, don't have easy walk-in offices and don't return phonecalls.

Leave a note on the door that says you want the TV and you'll haul it away. If the crew get rid of it they'll have to pay e-waste. You'll be doing them a favor. Some might even do something sketchy like say it was your grandparents' TV and it's the only thing you have to remember them by.