Our Investor Hubzu Experience...

[Vijaianand Thirunageswaram]

I am sure many of you investors have come across Hubzu online auction site. I deal with auction sites and Hubzu was one of them. They used to be Altisource now Hubzu. Cool name huh!!

Anyway, they have very good processing office all over to get this things moved faster on closing the deals if the property is good and clean. We closed few in the past but this time around we had issues and had to get around it. 

1. They had judgement pending in the property and never told us until 2 weeks before closing. After my investors spent time and money on appraisal and survey, we had to terminate and get out of the contract. It will be long wait before it's ready to close. Be careful to check it out before you start wasting your money. Title commitment didn't have anything on it. 

2. Another gotcha, all these auction sites charge the premium and other fees which are not part of the sale price at times. Your lender won't consider them sale price unless you request them and get approval from underwriter. It will be too late at that point because appraiser got request to appraise the property for purchase price which doesn't include those fees. It happened to us and he appraised exactly for that price and lender didn't want to approve to include those fees with the purchase price. 

3. Finally, auction sites you might find reasonable deal but gotta work with their pace otherwise you end up losing money. You need to send earnest money in 2 days after signing contract. Get all lender squared up to move quickly to the time line. Don't forget to have max credit approval days if going with financing. Cash deals, make sure to go through the title properly before closing and raise any objection needed. You cannot get out of the deal and you will lose your earnest money.

Again, I look for deals all over and auction sites are good source and works most times if all things are working along well for you. 

Hope this helps.