All Forum Posts by: Victor Noriega

We have a investment property in Austin. The current tenant has been there for 2-1/2 years. We had told the current tenant last year that we intend to sell the property and had offered it to them at a discount. They said they needed to fix their credit but they also wanted a bigger home. 

Prior to the lease ending, they said they wanted to stay another 3 months. We gave them a verbal approval and sent them the 3 month lease to sign. They did not respond for three weeks and in the middle of May, they asked to meet for the signatures. By this time my wife and I noticed that the economic conditions had changed and the CMAs were a lot higher then we had anticipated. We confirmed with a realtor. 

Well the lease is up on May 31st and we allowed them to go month-to-month with the lease ending on June 30th. We are placing the home on the market on June 2nd. 

The tenant has been approved to buy a home. This is great news, I thought. Now the request from the tenant is to stay until August 10th because that is when their new home will be ready. 

I want to sell it as soon as possible. What are some options?  

If we lived in the same city or had a team setup, then the renovation would be done.  The DOM for $60k 3-6 months and the DOM for $87k is the same. 

Thanks for the reply.  We are going to only insure the structure.  Would installing an alarm system help with the insurance cost being that the property is vacant, or should I just avoid that expense?  

We are buying cash, no mortgage on the property.  We used private money from a relative.  Our experience with land deals gave us credibility, and we are able to secure the money and pay when we sell the property.  

What we are looking for now, is an El Paso realtor with experience working with investors. The one realtor we contacted did not want to post the property on the MLS until closing. The contract we used allows us to market the property as soon as possible.

We have a home under contract. We are buying it at $45k and had an appraisal done and it appraised at $63k. We contacted a local realtor and their CMA says the house could be listed at$87k with repairs done. The house needs carpet in the bed rooms, interior and exterior paint, and some landscaping. We estimate the repairs are between $5k to $7k. There is an estimated $40k mortgage that will be paid at closing. Seller will walk away with $5k. We keep going back and forth on whether or not do a wholetail or fix-n-flip. We don't live in the same city. We live in Round Rock and the deal is in El Paso. leaning toward selling as a wholetail deal since we are to far away to manage the flip. If we fix n flip, we could set everything up and get carpet, paint and landscaping done in two weeks or less. But then we would have to figure how to manage the flip remotely. We are experienced in closing deals remotely, as we buy and sell land. But We don't have experience with house flips. Either choice, we would still have to hire a realtor to market and sell the property. We appreciate any advice. Looks like we need to make sure we have insurance, transfer utilities. What am we not thinking about? I want mitigate any risks before we close the deal.

Luke, those are awesome numbers.  What are you mailing costs per letter on this type of volume?  I'm limited on time, and it limits the number of calls I can receive, research, and respond to.  I also just started to expand beyond Texas.  I'll use your numbers as a benchmark to reach at the end of the year.  

my call volume for this year has been very low almost 0%. I've been sending out about 100 letters a week for Jan - March. But last fall, I had great return rate, close to 5%. I am not sure why. But I know that you should not give up. One thing you can do, if you use a mail service like click2mail, add yourself as one of the receipients. This way you know when your targets get the letter. To answer your original question, you get calls about three after the letters are mails out and they last for about a week. So you need to keep mailing in a weekly basis to keep your call volume constant. Hope that helps. 

I actually thought the costs were too high as this is land. these are the standard charges that the title company charged for title insurance and admin fees. 

I passed on this deal. The numbers did not support its purchase. The seller wanted $10k and the assessed value was at $15k. This property was hard to validate as there was no other properties for sale nearby. The seller mentioned someone offered $40k for the property once the probate issues were resolved. However the seller would never produce the name or contact information. On top of this the seller asked me to front the lawyer cost for probate fees. I said I was unable to do this.  I kept in contact and the seller never moved forward with an attorney. I even called an attorney referral service and gave them the contact info. I even posted a elance job to see if an attorney could provide some assistance at a discounted rate. However the seller would not budge on their $10k and kept asking me for a personal loan. Our last conversation ended with me telling them I had done all I could and they needed to follow up with one of the laywers to resolve it. 

Anyone know how to remove a Power of Sale mechanic's lien? The seller has a property with this type of lien, however, no work was done on the property, it is vacant land. The Lien is a "power of sale" where they entered a contract with a builder. The builder has since gone bankrupt.

Hi BP, I have come across a deal for a property where the owner of record on the deed is deceased.  My direct marketing campaign led me to the daughter of the deceased owner.  There was no will, and the daughter says all other heirs are also deceased.  The daughter has tried to sell the property before, I verified with the title company she was working with.  

The issue was that the daughter did not have enough money to go through probate.  This is what she told me, and this is a new situation for me.  The daughter is highly motivated to sell, and there is a potential $19k upside to wholesaling this property.  

So how can we move forward?  

If i paid to initialize probate on the daughter's behalf, how can I guarantee, that she will sell to me?  

I cannot place any lien on the property as the deed owner does not owe me anything.  And the title company said, the process to get the title transferred can take up to 6 months.  

Could I place the property under contract for over a 6 months, but if another living heir is found, then I could potentially lose out.  Any Probate experts out there that have experienced this situation?