All Forum Posts by: Dan Losh

In California, we used escrow companies and rarely used lawyers. I've been acquiring REO properties in New England and they use lawyers. I've enjoyed using the lawyers as their legal advise has helped me on a couple transactions. One deal, the seller, Bank of America kept hassling me and appeared to want to back out of the deal.... exasperated, I had my lawyer intervene with the sellers broker and got the deal back on track.

I think the bank wanted to accept a higher offer as there were 10 offers on it and mine was not the highest offer, but it might have been the only cash offer. I was offered $15k by one of the losing buyers to let them take over the deal as I have an assignee clause in my offer. But that house I need to move into so can't wholesale it. Besides, It's worth $60k more before I even close the deal...

The lawyers cost more than escrow companies, but when the S@#T hits the fan, if you have a good lawyer... they can save your deal or whatever you want with the deal.

Well if you are wholesaling you should be doing contract assignments so there wont be any closing cost for you.  Your buyer should want to close with an actual closing attorney and get title insurance as they wont want to inherit any issues. 

I have only had one buyer in over 500+ sales who wanted to buy from me and just do a quit claim with no closing attorney involved.

I would make sure you're very upfront with the seller from the beginning. If you don't have a buyer lined up already but have already networked with a few, you can tell the seller something like this: "I work with several investors throughout the city. My job is to find properties that fit their criteria, and I think yours will be a good fit. Once you and I reach an agreement and open up escrow, I'll schedule a time with you to get them in here in the next couple days to verify the condition and my numbers."

If none of your buyers are interested, find out why. If it's the price, you can find out where they need to be for the deal to make sense. Then you can try renegotiating with the seller for this lower price, hopefully while still within your inspection period.