All Forum Posts by: Kris Fox

A REO is on the MLS in my area for $70,000. It needs about $50,000 in work and will have an ARV of $185,000. The house encroaches on the vacant lot owned by somebody else next door. This is public information available in the listing. I asked my realtor about making an offer and he told me there was already one person under contract plus a backup.

I contacted the owner of the vacant lot and I was able to get the lot under contract. I've had my realtor contact the listing agent to tell her that we have the lot under contract and she recognized that we now have the strongest position to go after buying the REO. It hasn't been explicitly stated that we will not grant any easements or variances on the lot, but it has been implied. She told me to make my offer. What should it be? How much leverage do I have in this situation.

CLIFFS: I have a contract on a piece of property that is encroached upon. The only way for anybody to do anything with the REO property is to own my lot. (This has been confirmed by my attorney). What should my offer on this property be?

Wow, I've gotten a lot of responses in a short amount of time. Thanks everyone for your feedback. I'm going to give the investor a call and tell him what's happened and as long as we can come to an agreement with terms, I'll continue to work with him.

It sounds like the majority feel if I can't come to terms with him, that I should just walk away to avoid any possible repercussions in my investing community.

In the future to avoid these scenarios again, I should carry around a list of all properties I'm considering and if an investor presents one of these same properties, I need to disclose immediately.

I am a hard money/private money lender/rehab-er in my area. I had a lunch meeting with a rehab-er about a project he was considering. He showed me the property he was looking at and gave me all of the details (it happened to be an REO listed on MLS). We parted ways with me telling him he needed to meet x-criteria for me to consider the note.

Meanwhile... my realtor/investment finder and I had been discussing several properties over the prior week to my lunch meeting we were going to be putting offers in on. The way my realtor and I typically work is he knows I just want to hear numbers. Well, one of them sounded good and I asked for more information and I find out that it's the same property the investor I had lunch with was interested in.

I want to put an offer in on the property myself, but I know it's going to look shady as if I poached a deal from the investor. Even though I know it didn't happen like that, it's still going to look bad. On top of that, it came from a publicly listed-source that everybody has access to. What would you do?

Wow, Kent. That's a lot to consider. I'll do my homework and I'll get back to you. Thanks.

I'm looking at a 10-unit mobile home park that has a tax value of 260k. It has total notes as follows:

160-170k 1st
80k 2nd
6k 3rd

for a total of 246-256k

How would you go about negotiating with Junior lien holders assuming this park will not sell for more than 80% (if that) of tax value given what I know about my area?

I just had a similar situation where I was the lender on hard money and the borrower tried to issue his parents a lien on the property to tie up my collateral. My attorney told me not to worry as it was clearly "fraudulent conveyance." We got him to subordinate the lien on the property and there were no issues.