What To Do When You Can't Find The Answers You Need

[Greg Helbeck]

I want to share a story of a deal that Jason McDougall and I did back over the summer and point out a few lessons that hopefully can help others out.

I ran into a hairy property in the DFW area and we realized that the heir of the estate was the stepdaughter of the previous seller. We got her on the phone and she agreed to sell us the house and once we had the deal inked up, we ran into some title issues (as always ;). The title company did not feel comfortable issuing title insurance because they did not have a clear picture of the family tree. It turns out that the deceased owner had no siblings alive or kids alive so the stepdaughter was the next one in line to inherit the house.

We had to hire a genealogist to determine all of this and if we did not take the action to hire the genealogist, we would have left a $20,000 wholesale fee on the table. Most people would have given up on this file and quit so they could go try and find the low hanging fruit.

That is not the model that I operate, I look for reasons to call the genealogist. The harder.... the better.

The key lesson I learned on this file...when you hit a wall on the tough files, make an action step plan of what controllable actions can get taken in order to try and overcome the objection. A genealogist happened to be high on the list and it worked.

Hope this could help a few others and get them to close out some of the harder properties.

and as always...

We are looking for some passive partners who would be interested in getting involved in some of our rental and flip deals in New York from a passive perspective. If you were ever interested in finding out how you could get involved, feel free to reach out and we can talk about some potential options on working together.