Closing a deal with 17 Decision Makers and Massive Title Issues

[Greg Helbeck]

I want to share with everyone the most complex deal I have ever completed so far.

Over a year ago I ran into a pretty good opportunity where there was a substantial tax issue on a specific house I was looking at. After doing some more investigating, I realize that there was a really good opportunity to solve a problem because there were a lot of things that didn't make sense on paper so I decided to do some further research. After rolling up my sleeves I found out that that property had been vacant for several years and there were major title problems aka “hair" on the deal that made it very tough for other investors to solve.

Btw…I LOVE deals with hair on them.

To make a long story short, after one full year of putting this deal together, we successfully completed the transaction and purchased the property. However, we purchased the property off of 17 heirs. The owner on the title was deceased and the deceased owner had no children and also had no living siblings which meant we had to hire a genealogist to trace down the family tree and get to the people who legally sell us the property. In this case, it was the cousins! We had to sell 17 different people on why this was a good idea for them and then we had to complete 17 separate affidavits and get them notarized and then work out the closing logistics because the heirs were all over the country. This deal was like a part-time job for a year! Here are my top three lessons from this transaction

#1. Sometimes it's super beneficial to pursue the non-low-hanging fruit. This deal was in a hyper-competitive market and I had no other investors competing with me because of the complexity of the title issues. Not a single one in sight.

#2. Sometimes it's worth it when you need to take massive time risks. On this deal, we had to have 17 separate people agree to the price and the terms so if one of the decision-makers did not agree, this whole thing could have been a wash and a year of my time could have been wasted. I knew that the risk would be worth the reward so I decided to take the risk and it obviously paid off.

#3. Even in a hyper-competitive market, if you're dealing with the right type of seller and you can truly understand the problem that you are solving and they understand the value that you can bring, the price is never going to be an issue because they already see the value you bring besides the price. The family that sold us this house was very grateful for everything we did for them to help them out of this situation and because of that, they had no problem selling the property to us at a lower price because of the service that we provided them.

If anything, hopefully, this can inspire some other people to pursue some properties that might have a little bit more "hair" on them so they can reap some of the benefits.

If you were ever interested in finding out how you could work a little bit closer with my company, feel free to reach out and we can talk about some potential options on working together on a more passive side.