All Forum Posts by: Alex K.

I went to my first local REI club meeting last night. There was a speaker representing a company that extinguishes your bank note due to mortgage fraud. It works like this: you are an upside-down homeowner or owner of commercial property which is under water. You pay this company $1500 to $2500 and they will investigate your bank note and determine if it was handled in a fraudulent way (he said most are). Then then will use their legal knowlege to "extinguish" the note and sell the property. You get 30% of the sale amount and the note is gone. They don't guarantee it will work every time.

Now this guy is in the marketing area and can't answer exactly how this is done. There were many people asking him questions after the meeting. I spent the whole time trying to figure out if he's a moron or a scam artist or both.

Has anyone here heard of this scam before?

BTW I offer this service for only $1000 but of course it's not guaranteed.

"I assume you can go under contract before the 90 days is up, but NOT close until the 91st day, correct???"

That's correct. I went under contract to sell right after closing on a FNMA property and just put the closing date out 3 months. In the mean time I'm renting it to the buyers and they are rehabbing it to live in.

A question for J. Scott:

An offer with no inspection contingency means you have either spent a lot of time inspecting the property yourself or you are taking a big risk. If you spent a lot of time, that will add up to a big waste of time with a lot of unaccepted offers. If you don't take the time to inspect each property in the pre-offer stage, you could get stuck with major hidden problems. How do you avoid the risk and/or time wasting?

Thanks for the advice.

I have an unusual situation:

I own a property which is under contract to sell to my tenants on Nov 1. This happened because they wanted to buy it immediately after I bought it but there is a 3 month deed restriction from FNMA.

The tenants are fixing the place up. The rental agreement states that I am to receive copies of receipts for all work done to the property. My plan was to use these receipts to increase my basis value of the property. Since the repairs are being done while I still own the property, I should be able to do this, right? Does it matter that I am not the payee on the receipt? For example the plumbing bill is $3400 (install RV water/sewer/electrical hookups) and it shows the date and the property address, but my tenant's name on it. Will the IRS frown upon this?

I don't see how the tenants could use the receipt to increase their basis value since they did not own the property when the work was done.

Could you insure it very well and then rent it out to some fire jugglers?

I bought a property from Fannie Mae and there was a deed restriction saying I could not sell it for more than 20% profit for 3 months. To get around it my buyer and I made up a contract with a closing date 3 months from my buy date, and I'm renting it to him in the mean time. Not ideal but it works.

Too bad we can't put in an addendum to the contract which states the bank is not allowed to make a profit.

My current residence is a house I bought with dog urine stains in the carpet and the associated smell. I paid a carpet cleaner to come out and clean it, they said they could get out the smell. After the cleaning the smell was twice as bad, even days later!

I tried the enzyme and nature's miracle stuff, bottles of it and no difference.

I ended up removing the carpet, painting the subfloor with 2 coats of oil-based kilz, and replacing the carpet and pad. It worked.

If you do go the carpet cleaning route, tell them you will pay when the smell is gone. If they don't accept that, they probably aren't confident in their ability to eliminate it.

And I'm looking for other Irish-German-English investors to network with.

The reason why I did it myself is because I did pay someone to do the attic with the cellulose. I went up there a month later for something else and saw that it was all piled up in the middle and they didn't bother to get the edges, I could see the ceiling drywall. It's been my experience that if a contractor thinks you won't see the work (crawlspace or attic), he does a half-assed job.