All Forum Posts by: Robert Kriedermann

Resolution - They updated my escrow to remove the extra tax payment. They did not give me my money back but since the money was used to pay on a different property I own, It's not a huge deal. They basically took my money and used it to pay one of my other bills that I would of had to pay anyway. @Chris Mason

A few years a go I purchased 2 duplexes from a single seller with cash that are about a quarter mile from each other on the same street.

Over a year ago I refinanced just one of the properties. The payment was $857.70 per month which included escrow for taxes and insurance. In Sept 2019 I received a letter from the lender that I had an escrow shortage of $3629.60 and I can either pay it now or they will increase my monthly payment to $1160.16 to cover the difference. I looked at my escrow information online and they paid not only the correct tax bill but also the tax bill for the other property on the same street that i do not have a loan on.

I called in October 2019 to sort it out but I got the run around. I kept calling every couple weeks but never was able to get the same person on the phone more than once. They have no method of reaching a person directly and I don't get anywhere when asking for a person by name and company ID number. Eventually I reached a supervisor who said they would look into it and would call me back with updates. They called twice more and each time they had a new date sometime in the future for when it was scheduled to be resolved by. Then they stopped calling. Every time I call I get someone new. Recently I checked and now they have paid the wrong tax bill a second time so instead of having a zero escrow balance after their first mistake, I have a -$2000 escrow balance.

What can I do? I don't want to pay an extra $300 per month so i can fill the escrow so they can use it to make another mistake with but I also don't want to stop paying because that will put me in default. I have been trying to get this fixed for almost 4 months and have made no progress at all. The bottom line is that they used my escrow money to pay something we had no agreement about and now they want more to do it again. I talked to a new supervisor today and they told me they would call back by the end of the week with an update. I've heard that before... The loan company is Specialized Loan Servicing. Does anyone have any advice?

Update: 

I ended up sending 8k pieces of mail a month for 3 months for a total of 24k pieces at a cost of about $12k total. After tracking and keeping in contact with all the promising leads I did get one worthwhile rehab deal at the end of three months. I'm pausing the direct mail until I sell one of the 5 properties I'm currently in the process of flipping.

I am working an absentee lead in a B area right now. If I could get that, it would make all the calls and mailings worth it. Wish me luck!

 Yeah I went into it thinking I would hit this list once a month for 6 months. I'm prepared to do that but the results so far are discouraging.

 I am definitely not offering too much. I want to be very careful in those areas. Investors within 1/10th of a mile are paying $2,500 to $20,000. I'm getting calls from the D and D- neighborhoods. I didn't mail to the F neighborhoods. I make a lot of $2500 -$10k offers. I might offer $2,500 for a property in bad shape and $10k in good shape. I've put none under contract. The seller's don't bite on that because they can't believe that's what the comps are. It's possible I could get lucky and find some buyer to pay $30,000 for a house I offered $10k on so maybe I should have offered $20k but It's risky and I'm afraid to be stuck with a property in a war zone. I'm doing 3 rehabs in $300k areas right now so I don't need to be running around in warzone areas taking a lot of risk for not a big potential return. I'm going to scrub my list and take any property I know is in those areas out. I'm sure it will result in a much smaller call volume but at least I won't be chasing leads that aren't worth it.

@Jason Hopkins I know he pays someone to put them out. I'm not sure exactly where he puts them. Sometimes they stay up, sometimes they get taken down right away, and sometimes the city calls him and threatens fines. 

I rehab it, it is in an owner occupied neighborhood. Almost all of the calls I received were not so I planned to buy as is and list as-is for sale on the MLS. The median prices in the areas that called were about $15k so it doesn't take a lot of capital to buy for $10k and sell for $20k and make $7k. I would have been happy to do that but there were no clear opportunities to do so. For example, one guy was interested in selling for the back taxes he owned of $3,000. But the place was boarded up and in bad shape in a bad area. There were plenty of sales in the neighborhood at $2500. It is possible someone would have paid $10k but it is hard to tell the difference between a $2500 house and a $10k house by pictures in MLS. It wasn't worth the risk to me to buy that property and deal with keeping the house safe and myself safe visiting the property everyday to check on it for maybe $7k or maybe lose money. My average deal is buy for $75k, put $45k into it and sell for $160k in a solid owned occupied neighborhood. I mailed to those places but got very few calls.

If the house isn't in an area that would be good for a flip (which 90% or more of the calls I have gotten are not good for flips even though I mail to all absentee owners within 45min-hour of me) I make an offer where I could wholesale the property by buying it with cash, and listing it on MLS to make a profit. It seems like deals would be in there but I talked to everyone and I'm not sure that there were. Maybe something is missing but I'm not sure what it is.

 I get deals from other means. I'm working 3 rehabs and 2 wholesale deals right now. I want to do more and have more consistent deal flow. I don't have the stomach for bandit signs. I know a guy who puts them out consistently in my area and he gets calls and threats from the authorities all the time. I thought direct mail would be a good way to increase from 10 rehabs a year to 20 rehabs a year. I think I will keep mailing to my list but take a lot of names out.