What I learned from buying a house with a squatter!

[Greg Helbeck]

I wanted to share with everybody a few lessons that I learned on one of our best properties this year.

My partner and I ended up buying a property with a very unique situation.

The seller's main concern was that he did not want to deal with his brother who was squatting in the house so he said he would sell to us at a discount if we can deal with the brother.

We decided to take the leap of faith and get the property under contract. Once we had it under contract, we realized that it was going to be very tough to wholesale this property because there was a squatter occupying the house and none of our buyers were interested in buying anything like that.

Because of the price we had the house for, we decided to take a risk and by the house ourselves with the squatter in the property.

As it turned out, once we bought the house, the squatter voluntarily left the property.

Now, this could have easily gone the other way and we could have been stuck fighting to get this squatter out for months. Sometimes stuff will go your way and in this case, it did.

Once the squatter left, we were able to do some quick value-add stuff like a good cleaning and changing doors and then we listed the property on the market for a substantial profit.

Here are my 3 biggest lessons on this deal.

#1. Always have more than one exit strategy. If we were only able to wholesale this property, we would have been out of luck because we had to buy this property based on the situation.

#2. Sometimes you have to take a risk to make bigger profits. We knew that the risk was limited and the upside was big so we decided to take a leap of faith and by this property with an active squatter. It ended up working out in our favor. I very well could have gone the other way if the squatter did not want to play nice!

#3. Sometimes things will go your way, and sometimes things will go south. This deal could have very well gone the other way if the squatter wanted to give us a tough time. We took that at face value and still decided to proceed forward which ended up being a good decision on our part.

I hope you got a few takeaways from these lessons. If you were ever interested in finding out how you could work closer with our company feel free to reach out and we can talk about some ways we can work together potentially.