Off Market Property- What’s next?

[Ricardo Delgado]

Good morning everyone,

I started marketing to absentee owners in my market (Chicago land Area). I have 2 leads that seem very promising and want to know how I should go about sending an offer.

The current owners want to meet but I want to have offers written up or a contract to see if we can come to an agreement.

Should my next step be to consult with an attorney?

I want to structure a cash offer/hard money loan, and a seller finance option.

Anyone that has any tips on what to do next? Or can recommend an attorney that I should talk to?

Thank you.

[Philip Gephardt]

Opening note: I am not necessarily saying this would work for every property, but it worked for one I bought earlier this year.

I bought a property in Southern Illinois (I live in Utah) that was a cash deal earlier this year. I found a property on Zillow for sale by owner. I did my own CMA, talked to my property manager in the area, who ran over and said, "I think it will rent for X, and I'm not seeing any glaring issues". My numbers checked out.

I've owned the property for about 6 months, and I'm happy with it.  My PM owned 100 properties in the area, and I trusted his judgement. But I did all the closing myself.  Because no one else was involved, I was able to get a great price by reminding the seller that we really only had to pay for title, and since it was a cash deal, we were able to close in 10 days.

I went on one of those boiler plate lawyer websites (Maybe rocketlawyer.com, I can't remember), and did a boiler plate purchase agreement.  Ran the title, checked out.  Called a lawyer who wrote up the necessary docs, and informed title.  It was surprisingly effortless.

In retrospect, ALOT of things could've gone wrong, but they didn't, and I had the property acquired in 10 days, and 20 days after my initial offer I had a tenant with good credit at $75 more than I was expecting :-)