Wholesalers and Subject To Never Get Sued, Right? - - - - -- Wrong . . .

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Equity skimming: Tale of a local home sale and a lawsuit

Former ‘wholesale finder’ says he was thrown under bus by the prominent real estate investors.

https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/equity-skimming-tale-of-a...

Lundquist described his job as what was called a “bird dog,” or wholesale finder tasked with searching for low-value properties to be purchased by the agency, invested in, and sold for a much higher price.

The properties that Lundquist was asked to find would be relatively low in value — decrepit houses, homes in foreclosure, tax delinquent homes and even homes with recently deceased owners.

These kinds of properties are valuable to certain real estate investors because they can be purchased for low prices, then flipped and resold for lucrative profit margins.

The home was going into foreclosure because Larson owned over $11,000 in delinquent property taxes. Because of Larson’s fixed Social Security income, he could not afford to pay the property taxes he owed, nor could he afford the cost of utilities in the home.

Lundquist maintains that he did not draft the purchase and sale contracts, nor did he negotiate finalized prices for property sales. He said the finalized contracts were brought by someone like Will Heaton or James Dainard, of Heaton-Dainard, or Nick Weaver, of Northwest Home Buyers.

The lawsuit that Larson and his lawyer filed did not name Heaton-Dainard explicitly, though it did name Lundquist, his assistant and friend Huy Bui, Will Heaton, and a handful of other companies that Lundquist described as “shell companies,” intentionally written into the contract to “strip money” away during the purchase of the property while also protecting the parent company, Heaton-Dainard, from being implicated in a lawsuit.

The main issue with the Larson property purchase and what Lundquist believes likely triggered the lawsuit was the fact that some of the companies and parties involved in the transaction made more from the signing of the deal than Larson did for his own home. Larson walked away with around $40,000 for the sale of his home after he paid on taxes he owed.

After the deal was signed and Larson received $40,000 for a house worth $300,000, Lundquist received a $22,000 “finder’s fee” for making the deal happen, Bui received a $12,500 assignment fee, a company called Sound Real Estate Network made $16,250 and a company called Invest Now made $48,750 in the deal, according to the legal compliant. Lundquist said Invest Now is a company owned by Will Heaton.

Things continued to get worse for Lundquist. He had to avoid giving people his full name because of fear they would not work for him. He was losing sales and money, and he and Bui were fired by Heaton.

The next few years were hard on Lundquist. He went from making good money as a wholesale home buyer to struggling to find a job that would hire someone implicated in an equity theft lawsuit.