PROFESSIONAL SQUATTERS like this one don't bother you?

So today's subject I'm going to talk about today is professional squatters. Someone who stays in their home and tries every single possible strategy that they can think of to stay in their house. The reason we call them professional squatters is that what they normally do is stop making payments on their home; they end up in foreclosure and they use eviction moratoriums to slow the process down. They know how to file a bankruptcy or use a modification or a short sale as a tool to allow them to stay in their home as long as possible.

Let me give you an example of this. I had a property that an HOA foreclosed upon many years ago and the HOA got tired of working with the individual to get them to pay on their home or to try to get them to move out.

This went on for years and based on that they sold us this property because they no longer wanted to deal with the individual that was inside. We took this property over and we found several things.

Number one we found that their loan which was estimated to be about an $88,000 payoff ended up being over $220,000 with principal and interest in arrears. And so all the equity in this house was basically gone. The individual inside the home her father died several years ago and when the father died she never made a payment on the loan. As far as we can tell, she stopped making payments on her HOA, she stopped making payments on her loan and she basically stayed in the home for years.

This is a good example of a person who is in a distressed position or in this case a professional squatter. The minute a person starts to miss payments on their home they immediately start to take advantage of a financial windfall so to speak because if your monthly payment is 1,500 bucks a month and you no longer make it and you do it for a year you're gonna save roughly eighteen thousand dollars. And if you do that for multiple years, every year you don't pay rent, you're actually putting money in your pocket and so people that are like this and do this are almost what you call a professional. They get really good at what they're doing. I've seen people that have filed multiple bankruptcies, I've seen one woman who didn't even live in the home, and every time someone tried to take it to foreclosure sale she would file bankruptcy. The last time we checked she had filed over six bankruptcies on her home to try to keep the house and it was almost a game to her because she didn't even own the house. I mean she didn't even live in the house anymore and she just kept filing bankruptcies to stop the sale and the trustees just let her get away with it. Basically what they could have done is gone into the courts and filed a moratorium.

I had a client recently in my system who had a squatter that originally purchased the home via an owner carry back. And so what she did is she sold it to the gentleman. He started making payments on the home, He got the deed or an option to buy the home at a certain time. If he made enough payments he moved into the house and started making payments after a couple of years on a five-year term he stopped making his payments at which point he started to squat or stay in the home without making a payment. He actually went through the eviction process paid the attorneys got him out when they got him out it took several cops and a police helicopter and all kinds of people that were called in to try to get this person out of the home because he was trying to just stay in it and created all kinds of ruckuses to create a commotion. Threatening, violent this type of thing and eventually they got him out of the house.

What's even more important is a few days later he drove back to the home and moved back in again and she ended up having to go through the entire eviction process again. She had problems with the district attorney this happened to be in Texas and to this day the guy is still living in the home and it's been over two years and he hasn't paid any of his payments or his rents.

So these guys get this idea of the fact that they can use the system to their advantage. So let's back up here and take a look at why this happens.

The majority of the people who are in the business to buy a wholesale property what they're doing is they're buying a piece of property from an individual who is in a distressed position. This person can be on drugs, have a drug addiction, they can be an alcoholic, have an alcohol addiction, can be going through a divorce. If they're going through a divorce and it's a really nasty hostile divorce the house can have equity in it and the husband and the wife get into fighting and arguing with each other. And once they fight and argue with each other then it's as if I can't get the house. You're not going to get the house and so they get into this tug of war where there's two hundred thousand dollars worth of equity sitting in the home and they're fighting about their children and their money and their finances and the next thing you know they're gonna kill each other over the fact that no one's going to get the equity in the home.

When these types of situations exist it creates a distressed property situation. They stop making payments on the house, they destroy each other's credit and they go to court and fight with each other. And it just creates all kinds of promotion. You see it with health issues sickness people get sick they can no longer work they start to not be able to manage their financial affairs and they physically break down.

It can happen from people that go into jail they commit a crime they end up in a position where they have a house that's paid for and they end up in jail. And when they end up in jail the payments on the home can be made and for different reasons they start to lose the asset. So when you're buying a property in a wholesale position in most cases the person on the other side cannot financially manage their asset correctly.

Okay and let me show you how this kind of breaks down with a back-end story of this particular person in Texas. This uh individual was a child of a father who owned the home and the father passed away and died the child then inherited the house and this child did not have the means to make the payment to the same extent that her father did so she became an heir to the asset. He passed away so he can no longer make the payment on the home the heir then took the house over and could not make the payment so the strategy of the heir was to stay in the home as long as feasibly possible.

Okay, so what they do is they prey upon the goodwill or the grace of God that's within people or humanity and how they feel that they should take care of people and use that to their advantage in the situation. So what I would say is what probably happened is the people that were running the HOA eventually got tired of this woman not making the HOA payment; that her house was in disrepair or she wasn't mowing the lawn or she could have flat out been maintaining the house and just completely stopped making the payment.

When this occurs, then what happens is over time that HOA can go in and foreclose on the home and in this case, it could happen with a mortgage. It could happen with a tax lien all of these are primary ways that this happens so it could be simply that she's missing a mortgage and she starts to go into a cycle of stopping making payments with the bank.

As this process occurs what they start to learn is that its kind of like when you do something for the first time so if you're not a smoker and you decide to take a drag on a cigarette you all of a sudden have crossed that barrier of where you didn't smoke to where now you have smoked.

And as that occurs then it's easier to smoke again it's the same principle in this particular case when someone stops making a payment what occurs is that they realize that they just save themselves fifteen hundred dollars and once they do that then their mindset goes to the next step which is, “hey I can do this on a regular basis my bank doesn't foreclose on me right away,” And as that starts to happen then they learn other things that they can do to be able to make themselves money or to reduce the amount of money that they're paying to the mortgage.

What I can tell you is I've seen people that have missed payments for 10 years and the bank never foreclosed upon them. And I've seen where the arrearage is more than the principal amount of the property. So think about that strategy if you stop making a fifteen hundred dollar a month payment and you let's say your house is worth two hundred thousand and you miss a full year's payments that are eighteen thousand dollars and if you did that for ten years you effectively have gotten away with not making 180 000 worth of payments.

If it was five years on that strategy you got away with not making 90 000 in payments and that doesn't include your uh your late fees and all the other things that start to add up with missing a payment right so strategically what they find is that they go into a position they're not making a payment. Whatever it is it's a tax payment it's a mortgage payment it's an h-wave payment it's some type of judgment they got.

In this case, the person inherits the home from their mother or their father they can't make the payments, and what starts to happen is that all of the bills go on arrears. The mortgage payment can go on arrears, the taxes go on arrears, the HOA goes in arrears, and then it's just a matter of who's going to foreclose first right. And so in this particular case what she started to do is she started to miss payments on probably all fronts and as she did that then she started to execute strategies that allowed her to stay in the home longer. If someone filed a motion against her in court she goes in and she says these guys are kicking me out of my house the other thing s the body of politic out there, the judges, the people that are in these places they see this individual for the first time and they feel sorry for them and so it's really easy for them to not execute on the law appropriately.

So even though the law says one thing the judge will unilaterally make a decision that puts the business owner in a negative position. And so when this starts to occur there are many people in the community or the society that believe that what they're going to do is help an individual out who's in a bad position or a distressed position and when that individual learns how to take advantage of that situation which they often do. Then they can start to accelerate that and multiply it and make it many things that it's not so in this particular case that I'm sure this lady ran the bank the taxes and the home around the corner. She can go to the taxing entity and say listen I'll get on a payment plan so where the taxes are 200 a month so pay a hundred a month and let that continue to go into arrears and then if she's smart at what she does she can go in and she can see how long she can push that taxing entity to be able to allow them to not foreclose on her and still get what she wants to kick it down the road she can do the same thing with her HOA.

A lot of times the HOA is a community of individuals that are not a pro on foreclosing on the people that are in their community. They have bleeding hearts or hearts where they want to try to help them out so she can start to leverage the HOA and not pay that for years and then when they go to foreclose on her or victor or get her in compliance she can go in and plead that the hoa is taking advantage of her. And this little sum of money that's owed is something that she should not be booted out of her house for. It's the same thing with the mortgage company in this particular case her loan was one hundred and twelve thousand five hundred. Her amortized loan balance was eighty-eight thousand when we received the mortgage statement. She was two hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars in arrears on that property with the principal and all the late fees and everything she owed there was no way she was ever going to pay this off.

So what you see is this starts to become a professional squatter they go in, they use all kinds of methods to try to stop the court and to prey upon your goodwill and they will use it over and over and over to trigger you. In this particular case we got a hold of this asset one of my clients took possession of it they went in and got the mortgage statement where they asked how much was owed on the bank sent him a payoff of 715 000 it blew my client out of the water it was a 250 000 home right so we had to go back in and communicate with the bank and say why did you give them a payment of 715 000 this house only had a lien of 112 500 on it that was eventually adjusted and they sent a corrective notice where there was 222 000 it makes you think what is going on between the bank and the homeowner how long has this homeowner been playing the bank is there possibility that there are multiple debts that are owed?

There's some cross-collateralization there's some type of an agreement out there to where they were using other assets or other stratagems to be able to get this bank in a position where the world lots of money who knows her father may have very well been a perpetual squatter right a professional squatter and so this may have been perpetuated through actual heirs of assets from father to daughter type strategy you don't think this is possible it really is so at the end of the day what happens is we take to control the asset we start executing you can imagine how I feel well let me be real clear with you when I'm working with someone who is a professional squatter or anyone for that matter I have found that the smartest thing to do is to apply the law to its greatest effect so what do we go in and file a notice to quit a notice to vacate whatever it is an abandonment notice.

Whatever notice that the law requires in that state i immediately apply pressure through the law we go in and we sue her we move forward with trying to evict her this is what we call using the strategy of leveraging against the eviction in general when you try to get someone to do something that they do not want to do you normally think that you can get them to make the decision out of goodwill that does not work most people in this type of situation need to be compelled to move so they have to have the heat ratcheted upon them high enough to be able to know that they have no other choice so a lot of times people move when they're forced to move and as humans, we don't like to force people to move we like people to move because they choose to move and they do it out of respect.

And when you're dealing with these types of individuals you have to turn the heat up high enough to where they will actually realize that they can't play the game any longer so in this particular case in texas we filed an eviction covet hit when covet hit it added probably six months to eight months on to the eviction because now everyone goes in and says we have affection or disease or whatever they call it in their mind's eye we can't possibly evict these people we gotta keep them in their home that's that human side of things that we're going to help people so what does she do she now gets eight months a year whatever that amount of time is she uses the covid excuse right now. In the country we're seeing this all over the place: people using Koba did not go to court, did not go to work to get extra money from the government.

This is a stratagem and it doesn't have to be coveted some other type of method or something that they found that they can use to rely upon to get this deal done for them so to speak as a professional squad right so in this particular case she got several months through that stratagem the courts were shut down yadda time rolls by every month she's in that home she knows she's saving 1500 think about that for a minute if you can roll in fifteen hundred dollars into your bank account every month that's not a bad gig for doing virtually almost nothing right and using the system to make it possible for you to stay in that home because you can't possibly be kicked out onto the street right.

And so in this particular case what happens she uses the code we go in we file a motion what does she do with the judge renders that we get the eviction right the next strategy is okay we've got an eviction she's going to appeal the eviction process when she appeals the victim process she's required to post a bond but this little fancy term in texas called a pauper's affidavit we actually stood in front of a judge who told us that anyone who comes in with a pauper's affidavit she's going to allow that person to stay in the home without posting a bond because that's exactly what a poppers affidavit does it allows you to appeal the case and because you're poor you no longer have to make the payment on the bond which puts the investor at risk so she files her poppers affidavit goes in and sits on the stand says she has no money even though she's saving fifteen hundred dollars a month.

She's broke it's funny the day we evicted her which was yesterday she pulled out of the driveway in a Lexus of all cars imagine that right we've actually had people that drove two Mercedes Benz newer cars and the guys walked into court and said he's broke and the judge said I've not allowed a pauper's affidavit so we're going to give him one so you have judges on the bench right now that are bleeding heart they're activists for the those who are poor or cannot make it so to speak and so these judges will actually impede your progress into getting someone out of the home and actually enable the individual to move down the road even further to get where they want to go in this particular case she filed a pauper's affidavit that eliminated her bond so she had to post no cash then she went in and killed it.

she lost the appeal once she lost the appeals her next method of attack was hey listen I paid the hoa all the money I was on a payment plan they didn't receive my check and because they didn't receive my check they lost it and it was their fault and so now her next thing is she files a temporary restraining order right before the conviction is going to happen she goes into the court she pleads her case and says listen judge I'm going to get kicked out on the street I need to be able to have a way to stay in this home while I fight this mean old nasty hoa that's trying to take my house for five thousand dollars worth of rare edges right so the bleeding heart judge gives her time says let's go ahead and litigate this case.

It doesn't stop there so what does she do she files a temporary restraining order sues the hoa and us now get that one now this person's gonna sue us who purchased the home from the hoa never had a problem with this before we can purchase it on a tax sale a mortgage it's the same thing you might as well sue everyone if you're going to sue someone so she goes in pulls everyone on a lawsuit once she pulls them in on that lawsuit then what happens is she sues them for wrongful foreclosure right and that requires a judge and discovery and all of these things depositions and a fight in the courts right she does it pro se so what does she do she goes in pro se means she represents herself right that saves her attorney fees and then she uses an attorney to educate her on what to say and how to say it to get her to the next step in this particular case that's exactly what she did she filed a temporary restraining order sued the hoa us and everyone she could think of and said we were all bad guys kicking her out of her house.

She brings all she alleges all kinds of defenses and now she's headed to make more time right you get a bleeding heart judge okay let's go ahead and hear this case so in the meantime as she's filing a temporary restraining order she's suing everyone we're able to beat her strategically through the court system because we know the law better than she does what's really funny about this is even the people that I've talked to and known forever will make the exact same mistake and they become a bleeding heart I watched my attorney go on vacation and she had another attorney sub in for that attorney went to court and listened to this woman plead the case the judge looked at her and him and said i cannot believe that in each way foreclosed on this woman for five thousand dollars it's unconscionable.

Where's the judge's mind on this one did he forget that this woman was playing the hoa for many years and didn't pay a single dime did he understand that that was her mantra you don't get kicked out of a house because your hoa is being mean to you you get kicked out of the house because you're not doing what you're supposed to right and there can be arguments don't get me wrong I hate HOAs but at the end of the day there can be arguments all day long it's the same thing with taxes and mortgage foreclosures right so now what you have is a woman who goes in and gets the judge to see her way so what do they extend that hearing out they move the kick the can down the road move the ball down the road we beat us procedurally we come in and say judge here's the law you have to comply with the law the judge against his better will and humanity finally rules in our favor right so we set up the eviction.

We're now ready to kick this woman out of the house notice the way i said that i didn't say let's remove her nicely i said kick her out of the house and the reason i say that is because the next step is she files an emergency motion to have the case reheard and so the case is reheard the date is set but she doesn't get the right documentation to stop the eviction so she has a hearing on the 27th of this month but she has no order from the judge stopping the eviction we move forward on the eviction and we think we're good we'll look victor tomorrow morning at monday at 8 am now let me back up for a second here the minute the judge said that that deal was unconscionable he looked at my attorney and said you need to go figure out a way to settle with this woman or make it right with her where is your brain make it right with her this is the dregs of humanity.

This is a woman who's a professional squatter and i'm supposed to go meet her i get the attorney walk outside the court and he calls me and says we got to do something to settle with this woman and help her out here because the judge says we better or otherwise he's not going to rule favorably she's going to litigate forever with us that's what he tells me he actually sends me an email with three options for settlement do i think this lady's going to settle not on your life she's going to play him like a violin what's even worse about it the guy that works for me or with me i should say also starts to get a bleeding heart because he sees what the judge does and when he sees what the judge does and that it's unconscionable then he starts to feel the pressure or the leverage applied to him to relinquish with the attorney i'm like what are you doing you've been in this place many times before don't let this stuff get you.

This is all part of the play bro you got to wake up right so then they start to think we should sit on like snap out of this guys i go to the attorney we're not settling with her we're moving full steam ahead we're kicking this woman out we want her to be knocked out of the house as quickly as possible because she's playing everyone then they catch on to that realize what's going on i have to wake up the very individuals who have many times had to evict people and they themselves fall into the trap that's how bad this gets even the people that work on the other side get drug into it because the ladies singing some kind of song and dance so finally what happens the eviction is going to happen and the constable shows up to the woman's house right what do you think the woman's gonna tell the constable man these guys kicked me out of my house.

My father died i in all of these positions where i'm gonna lose my home and be put out on the street as she smokes her pot inside the house right so she's got this whole story these guys are terrible they're evicting me they're shrewd i can't believe they would do something so the constable comes back and picks up the phone and calls my guy and says what says well the eviction schedule but for thursday but we're going to put it off to a monday and my guy says well why are you putting it off till monday because i basically what he's saying is i heard the story of the woman and i think you guys are taking advantage of her right so he plays the humanitarian game as well too my guy comes back and says well no we really need it scheduled for thursday what i finally had to tell him is bro you gotta fight fire with fire when the constable walks up to the door.

You know what story is going to be pitched you got to be ready for this what you gotta do is you got to go in and you got to say to the constable when he calls and says i'm going to back up your date what you need to say right when he picks up the phone is hey did you hear the story what story did you hear about this woman about how she's gonna get kicked out and she's been not making her payments for five years and she's dragged the hoa the tax venue the mortgage company and everyone on the street through every kind of legal litigation you can possibly think of she's been every single pleading heart that's out there she's got the judges to rule in her favor she's got the people at the hoa that feels sorry for she's got the taxing entities she's playing at the mortgage company.

Who was this woman not played all because her father died decades ago you get the message right even though it's not decades you know where i'm headed with that right at the end of the day what you have to do is you have to counter her fire with a greater fire basically what i said is you go in and you lay the story out did she give your sob story well here's the truth right if you do that the date doesn't get bumped to a thursday to a monday what does that mean to us well let me tell you in texas over the last several days it's rained every day in texas when you evict someone you cannot evict them if it's raining on that day because you have to set all take everything that's in the house and put it on the lawn and leave it there for 24 hours and then they can come get whatever they want okay so what happens he bumps the date from thursday to monday because of a bleeding heart so how many times are we going to get beat to death by this woman right and then you're fearing that it's a rain day because it's rain 10 days out of the 11 days in this particular area of the state.

So now what you're looking at is a rain day and a potential eviction now do you think this is the last bullet in this woman's gun if you do you are deceived and as crazy as the rest of everyone who's listened to her the whole time i said straight up you watch she's going to file another emotion she's going to pull another trick or rabbit out of her hat sunday night comes and i this just gets me just to know and this just burns me up to no end i go to my attorney and i say we need to file a temporary restraining order and my attorney takes says it's going to take five days to get it hurt right whenever i'm talking to my attorneys they're always advising me to the law and how long it's going to take and a temporary restraining order is going to take five days well then i get this gal who goes in and hires another attorney.

You know what's interesting about hiring another attorney i read an article the other day where there was a person that was trying to be evicted they were trying to victim in new york and he managed to stay in the house for years if not a decade or more and they he literally had hired and fired many attorneys and the strategy was i hired a new attorney they've got to get up to speed on the case so we need an emergency extension of time what happens sunday night sure is shooting this girl hires an attorney he files an electronic motion at eight a at eight pm on a sunday to try to stop the eviction the monday morning my attorney gets word of that calls us up at six am and says there's a filing that's been headed into the court the judge could hear it this morning our eviction time is 8 00 a.m what's this woman trying to do what's her gain what's her strategy how many times has she played this record.

So what happens eight o'clock comes the constables show up the movers show up the constable says this house is packed to the gills you gotta have at least six people there we plan on 12 end up with 10 we bring 10 people to the job and what happens there's a rain cloud over the house so what do we do we got all this money invested in people in time attorneys working to get this woman out we probably spent you know probably a thousand dollars in legal fees from sunday night at eight until the morning when when our attorneys working with the judges and everyone to get them off of their humanitarian aid so he looks up and says if that cloud starts to shower and our guy looks up in the air and says well it's the only cloud it'll probably move by luckily the cloud didn't drop rain that day right it ended up being a clear day all day yesterday.

Second thing there were four constables to show up to the that showed up to this eviction two of the normal worker bees and the and the captain and the sergeant or whoever it was right so now you got how much of the government's money in play to evict this woman we were supposed to evict at eight o'clock didn't happen these guys were on the phone with the judge the courts everyone this lady climbs in her car and drives to the court and gets in front of the judge physically at the end we happen to draw the better card right the judge denies the emergency motion says he will hear the case on the 27th which is another eight days away and and finally four cops make us wait an hour we're spending all this money and time our attorney's on the phone the four cops get to go ahead from the judge.

And we start moving furniture out of the house at some point about two hours later we finally get the judge's order and he said that her emergency motion was denied four hours later all of that person's stuff is out on the lawn and guess what the guy that's in dreads that's in house smoking pot well he comes out of the house and he is sending all kinds of expletives to the cops to this to that he's arguing and fighting and whining and moaning he then goes and gets a u-haul truck and the cops tell us to load his truck for him can you believe that our labor evicting this guy and we're loading his u-haul for how much can these guys play the system where has humanity gone to.

I mean the businessman in the business world today if you're in my business you end up having to be extremely shrewd to people that are in their homes because if they if you're not shrewd you're gonna get played this lady got kicked out on a rear yesterday and here's the funny thing about it when the house was finally emptied out and all of the furniture's on the ground we still got a hearing to go to on the 27th where she's suing everyone what's going to happen with that hearing i can tell you what's going to happen with that hearing the minute she's out and she's lost possession she's not going to invest any more time in the case now she may this woman might display the system out even longer and drag everyone through thousands of courts fees as she runs in pro se and does as much as she possibly can this is what we call a professional squatter.

This is an individual who has played the hearts of the judge the constable the people that work with me the attorney who came on he has played their hearts like a violin and who am i i'm that big mean ogre who's gonna kick that woman out of her house and you know what i do it with joy in my heart and the reason why is because she's not going to play me it's sad but true at the end of the day you got to be aware of the professional squatters this is craig brooksby with the estates llc signing out everyone have a blessed day bye!