I'm about to have my next failure .. Help Biggerpockets!!

[Dave Ramirez]

We marketed to the Johns Hopkins area of Baltimore to take advantage of their $17000 down payment assistance. We stopped mailing to that area a while ago, but one our letters recently got a hit for a shell that would be eligible for the assistance program. My wife did the numbers and came up with $3000 for the MAO. Even though the most recent sales were for $1500 and $1050 for other shells, the active price for a shell was $5000. We were looking to make a $2000 wholesale fee on the property. If potential buyers came back with much lower offers we have our exit clause s built in, but this seller needs cash.

A good percentage of the properties in the area are owned by the city.

Nearby (100 yards away) some of the properties are going for $215000. We investigated and found that someone had bought multiple city blocks in Baltimore, fenced it off and created a haven for families to live. This property was just on the outskirts.  In fact 50% of all of the properties on this block were owned by one person. The Maryland system for property showed he was the owner but didn't show who the previous owner was and what he paid for the properties. Because of the blight and foreclosure issues in Baltimore my assumption was the previous owner was the city and the new owner purchased these for $200 or less. We are aware of a city program that allows you to do this as long as you have $1M in liquid funds.

We live in Virginia so my wife had to drive to Baltimore (90 minutes) to get signatures on the property. When she showed up he said he was getting offers for $5000. She left the paperwork behind and told him our offer of $3000 was good and he could fax in the signatures when he was ready. He called back last week and said he was ready. Our only problem was we recently got rd of our fax service and I forgot to tell my wife what the replacement solution was.  It is very hard to reach him because he has precious minutes on his mobile and no email. We told him to fax to our existing phone line and we would see him at the title attorney's office as soon as possible.

It's been 7 days and no fax!

On the buyer side we haven't even looked for elusive owner of the properties on our street. We went directly to the haven. We would love to start a bidding war between the owner of the haven and the soon to be haven.

We're not able to send over an address until we get the property under contract. 

We really executed poorly on this one and we need help either fixing this deal or getting better for the next one.