Who owns my house?

[Sherry Patterson]

I am new to this group and working on my real estate lic. planning to work in investment real estate.  So I have my own issue that I am hoping someone on here can help me understand. You guys are always talking about how to buy houses with other peoples money.  Well this is what happened to me and if that person doesn't realize you are buying a house with their money and profiting off of them then that is just not right.  Here is my issue:

4 years ago I agreed to "sell" my house to an investor because the market was bad and we could not sell and were wanting to build. He said that he could find a buyer at the max 4 months and they would refinance into their name and I would be free of the house. So I am not sure what we actually did at closing because the mortgage is still in my name. This prevented us from building because our credit report still shows we own the house and we had to rent for 2 years. After 2 years we were able to show that they were making the payments even though it is still in our name so we could buy a house. However, we could not use our VA because it is still being used on the other house. He did "lease to own" the house right away but they have never been able to "refinance". After 4 years the mortgage is still in our name and the investor has made the profit from the lease all of these years and never put a dime in. I actually paid him to take my house. Obviously in hind sight this was very stupid. If I had wanted to lease the house I would have done that myself and made the profit myself! I am now trying to figure out what my rights are and either force it out of my name or see if I can refinance and accelerate the loan with the current mortgage company and get the house back. They claim they hold the deed but again the mortgage is in my name so as I understand it I hold legal title. So what they have is equitable title? So what about the deed? Who actually owns the house and what rights do I have? Since I am just learning all of this when I read about a "land contract" the other day it sparked this and made me wonder what they actually own and try to figure out what I can do about it. It would save me a ton of money if I could refinance my current house using my VA. I can't read the contract right now because I actually left it with an attorney and unfortunately right after that my husband was laid off so we haven't had the money to continue having him look into it. So I was hoping someone on here might understand better what happened and how I can handle it. Also, for learning purposes since I want to work in investment real estate I want to understand how someone "buys" a house without actually "buying it". Thank you.