If the title of this article sounds a little harsh, it’s not and every homeowner and investor faces this problem more often than you know. If you buy a stolen car where the vehicle identification numbers (VIN) have been carefully fixed and the seller has a new title to the car, you wouldn’t know any better. That’s until you were pulled over and the officer checked and found you were driving a stolen vehicle. You will likely lose your money and certainly your car.

Most investors are familiar with what a lien is against a property. The most common liens are mortgages, equity lines,  code liens and open permits for work not completed but originally permitted. More and more municipalities are using Super Priority Liens to make sure that investors take care of problems that exist in their properties.

I received a call from a student who asked if I would put in an offer on a short
sale she was attempting. I said “yes” and checked to see what the comparables
were in the area. This short sale and the offer I made were in January of this
year. This property would have sold in the low $400k’s just five years ago. It is
located in a very nice neighborhood and I went out to see it to check out its
condition.

We have all heard the cliché “The check is in the mail” and of course, it never
comes. We have seen what we thought was every type of variation possible so
that people didn’t have to give us escrow deposit checks including:

Solutions to Four Major Rehabbers’ Problems that Kill Careers

I was at a meeting of a new REIA last week and I was listening to the lamenting of a few rehabbers about
the issue of low appraisals. Ever since the banks have their own pool of appraisers, most of the
appraisals have been coming in low. Of the five deals I overheard being discussed, four were appraised
very low and barely marginal in terms of net profits. Naturally, one rehabber got his appraisal expectation
but he seemed to be the exception.

I have often said that holding deals together is tougher than finding them. Following is a sample of
“issues” that arose with one deal that could have been deal killers but weren’t.

I guess I get tired of hearing complaints about a few realtors® never answering their phone or
emails or returning calls, never emptying their voice mail boxes, making sarcastic comments to
investors, not showing investors’ offers to asset managers and bragging about this in their emails,
trying to justify why even though the investor’s offer was higher than the price the property sold
for by using explanations from a Ouija Board and generally doing their very best not to do
business.

Don’t Even Think About it – or Else

This week life went from sublime to absurd as we have seen some more strange things
happening in the short sale and REO arena. Before I get into the actual events, I
should say that lenders holding REO properties continue to keep shooting themselves
in the foot with total disregard for common sense. They are allowing their asset
managers and listing brokers to put stifling provisions on their submission requirements
– effectively keeping out legitimate bidders for properties.

I don’t go a whole day without someone calling me to tell me a story about a property
they were involved in where a land trust was involved. It could have been the offer they
made in a land trust, where the seller had a land trust or usually where the closing agent
didn’t’ want to close the transaction because it was being bought in a land trust.

I read it all the time in the publications, “Investors get burned buying foreclosures
at the auction” or “Investors get burned buying tax deeds”. Both of these bargain
basement methods of buying properties can cause the darkest of greed to come
out of people. This greed blinds their common sense and they literally throw all
sanity out the window.