After about 4 months of waiting for the seller (the bank) to come up with a valid deed, it looks like we will finally be closing on The Leak House today…
After we’ve been absolutely patient and undemanding for four months, now that the seller is ready to close, they are frantically putting pressure on our attorneys and us to get this thing closed within 48 hours. This is understandable, as the banks like to get as much inventory off their books before the end of the month, but they don’t seem to care that getting to a closing takes time.
Even if my attorneys had nothing better to do than focus on my little REO purchase, they still need to pull updated title, they need to contact the HOA to get a payoff amount, they need to prepare the HUD, and most-of-all, they need the seller and the seller’s attorney to be cooperative with getting everything reviewed and signed. This can all take 3-5 days, but with the seller pushing so hard, my attorneys have been awesome, and were able to turn everything around in about 24 hours.
The house around the corner from The Trifecta House, has the exact same layout, and will be renovated almost identically; given how much interest we got on that house (literally a dozen interested buyers in just a couple weeks), I’m hoping this won’t be too difficult to sell. If we would have gotten this one purchased two months ago, we’d still have a list of buyers from that house that we could market this one too, but unfortunately, I think we’re a little bit too late for that (I imagine most of them have already found something else).
Our contractors are booked through the weekend, so they won’t be starting on the rehab until Monday, but hopefully the total renovation will only take 7-10 days, and the property will be on the market by the weekend of May 14. Our goal is to keep this rehab to under $20K…
J Scott,
Congrats on sticking with this and finally getting it closed. It sounds like your attorney really went to bat for you. Just curious if you do anything special for your team members, other than a thank you, when they go above and beyond like this? Best of luck on the rehab and getting it sold.
I love when people are patient in the right ways and it pays off… Congratulations and good luck!
Great story sometimes these are the best deals in the end Best of Luck!
Hey Ryan,
First, I need to point out that it’s because of our team that we’ve been successful in this business. There is absolutely no way we could have done it without them (and early on, we tried :)). They deserve more credit than we can ever give them.
As for repayment, we certainly try to go out of our way to make sure that the folks on our team feel appreciated and rewarded. We try to bring gifts for our mortgage broker and closing attorneys to every closing (gift certificates to nice restaurants, bottles of wine, etc). We try to take them to lunch as often as possible. We had a BBQ a few weeks back where several of our team came to our house. We’ll bring our contractors a case of beer every few days just to say thank you for the hard work. Etc…
The sad thing is, they are so good to us that it’s hard to reciprocate in a way that is equal. As an example, when we were refinancing our personal residence, our mortgage broker and our closing attorney both insisted on doing their work for free. When our kids were born, our painters painted their rooms for free. Since we try to bring them most of our buyers when we sell properties, our closing attorney charges us next-to-nothing when we use them to purchase properties. Our GC has had us over to his house for his kids birthdays. In fact, our closing attorney and his wife actually found us House #16 while they were out on a walk in their neighborhood (it was an estate sale)…we’ll be repaying that favor for a long time to come… 🙂
I’m sure I could think of plenty more examples like this; our team consists of lots of people who are just genuinely good and caring, and who understand the value of building and nurturing relationships. In fact, after a couple years with the same team, we’re actually pretty good friends with many of them (despite not knowing any of them before we worked together). And a couple of them we’ve become very, very good friends with.
All that said, the best way we can repay them is to refer them as much business as possible, which we try to do. So, if anyone in Atlanta needs a team, I have some referrals!