Distressed Home Q&A Recording – April 23rd, 2021

For your ease, we have provided a transcript of the Distressed Home Q&A Recording.

Hey, this is Evan with Simple Sale Central Florida. We’re back again this month for our April Q&A. Just to briefly introduce Simple Sale; Simple Sale buys and sells and brokers distressed residential real estate throughout Central Florida. That’s Tampa Bay, the Orlando area up to Ocala, down to Kissimmee or Haines City, and the Space Coast.

Our mission is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales, and we strive toward doing that on every transaction and every property that we buy or help broker with our clients. We really strive to bring transparency and accountability to an industry that can be very predatory. For the people that are trying to sell their distressed property, we try to bring a customer-centric, client-centric attitude to every transaction. 

So, we will go ahead and get into the questions: 

1. Are there any home-buying scams that I should be aware of?

There may be some kind of scam where they don’t actually buy your house. But the biggest scams are really the lack of care that a buyer or supposed buyer puts into the transaction where you may think that they’re going to buy the property, when in fact they actually may not. You may be 30-45 days into a transaction and then the buyer drops out because maybe they were trying to sell the property to someone else, or for whatever reason they are trying to lower the price on you at the last minute. And then if you won’t lower the price they’re going to leave you hanging. That’s really common. So, it’s really one of those things of working with a company that really cares about the end result with you, the seller.

If you’re working with a company that just cares about getting the property flipped as quickly as possible and whatever has to happen for them to get paid is really most important, then that’s probably not the company that you want to work with. So, that’s really the main thing is just companies that aren’t very client-centric that may leave you hanging after weeks of being under a contract and may try to lower their offer price on you at the last minute. That’s a really, really common tactic. 

Read More: Is Selling your House for Cash a Scam?

2. Is it possible to sell a distressed home without dealing with all the problems it has first?

It definitely is, yes, we buy properties all the time where there are tons of problems. Just say that they need repairs. We buy houses that need tons of repairs. Could be a complete rehab. Could be leaks in the roof, leaks coming in through the walls, things of that nature. We’ll buy properties with all those issues. Distressed in the sense of financial or liens, we’ll buy properties like that.

Code violations. We’ll buy properties like that as well. You really don’t have to deal with those situations. For you to sell the property to us, I know some other home buyers may buy like that as well. We’re pretty unique in the fact that we’ll buy when a lot of other people won’t.

Read More: How to Sell a House that Needs Repairs

3. How can I sell a house that needs work?

Your best option, depending on the amount of work, if it’s not that much work it’s possible you can still list it. We work with clients where the property may need work or a small amount, but they’re still going to have a better outcome if they just sell the property on the market. And we’ll help them list that property and try to mitigate those issues as much as possible for as cheaply as possible. So, you can do that, then you can sell to a distressed home buyer like us. There are other people that will buy properties that just need work.

So, you need to understand that if you sell to a distressed home buyer, typically you are going to be selling it for much less than what you’d be able to get if the property was fixed up and if you listed it on the market. When we buy properties, we typically buy them with the intent of reselling them, so we have to make money to continue operating. Yes, you can definitely sell a property that needs work to answer that question. 

4. Are there any cons to selling a house as-is?

There are. I mean the biggest con would be that you haven’t taken the time and money to fix it up on your own before you try to sell it, and so, you’re going to be selling it for less than that market price. That’s just a reality of the situation that if you’re going to sell it and it needs a new kitchen, new baths, new floors, whatever, all that’s going to add up, those costs are going to add up when selling your property. 

 So, those are really the only cons, but for the average person going and taking the time to do that work typically isn’t worth it. If you have a lot of other things going on just selling the property as-is in the long run if you try and do the work yourself you may realize that it wasn’t really worth it, especially if you deal with a few bad contractors. But you can consider that a con that you’re not getting that full market retail amount unless you fix it up, so yes, that’s really the biggest thing.  

Read More: Pros and Cons of Selling Your Distressed House As-Is 

5. We have a code violation on our home but need to sell. What can we do?

So, some companies like us will buy that property with a code violation and we’ll either close on it before we settle the code violation, or we’ll settle it after you get paid. It just depends on the severity of the code violation to know if we’d be able to close or not, but we’ve closed on properties with hundreds of thousands of dollars in code violation liens in the past. So, we’ve closed on properties with demolition liens, so we definitely have considered a lot of difficult situations that we’ve figured out and paid the seller, even before those situations were fixed.

6. I don’t have a lot of time before my home is foreclosed. Can you help?

Yes, absolutely. So, we are used to buying properties before they go to foreclosure. I would say a small percentage of properties that we buy are like that. Typically, people don’t wait until the last minute, but if you are in that situation, we will definitely buy properties that are going to foreclosure within the next couple of weeks. But, we don’t see it that often, but we can definitely help you for sure.  

7. Is it possible to sell a house with a lien on it?

Yes, it’s definitely possible. I would say 95 percent of homebuyers will not buy it. We will. We have in fact bought properties with hundreds of thousands of dollars of liens on them and closed on the property before removing the liens, so the seller gets paid for the property and then we go and negotiate the liens that can take months, not years, to negotiate those liens. So, it’s definitely possible. You just have to find the right buyer. We can definitely help you. I know we are one company that will. There may be some other ones out there that would help you, but it is definitely possible.

What happens a lot of times is someone will buy a house and not know it has a lien on it and then close, and then realize that it does have a lien. That’s typically the only way that a house will sell with a lien. But we will buy them knowing that they do have liens, and just taking that risk.

8. I inherited my parent’s home but I don’t really don’t have the time or energy to deal with it. What should I do?

So, in those situations, let’s assume you haven’t gone through probate, but you know you’re going to get the property. We dealt with this a lot, so we would help you go through the probate process with our attorney and handle that entire process for you. And then once you get through that depending on the condition of the property, we’d analyze it and say, “It’s probably in your best interest”, maybe if it has a ton of work we would say, “It’s in your best interest to just sell the property as-is for cash just because it needs so much work.” And we will make you an offer on it, but if it’s not in half-bad shape, which is what we see a lot, just decent, the house maybe needs updates, but not a big deal. We’ll typically just help you list it because you’re going to get the best and highest buyers that way. It’s not going to add much stress. Really, there’s probably going to be very few repairs. 

I know we have a deal going right now that’s pending a sale that is in that situation and it needs a few thousand dollars in work. The company, Simple Sale, put up the money for that little amount of work. We listed the property, sold it, and then got reimbursed for the sale of the property. So, it really just depends on the condition. So, if it needs a lot of repairs, typically it’s easier just for a cash offer, but if it doesn’t then your best route is definitely to list the property. 

9. I bought an investment property but don’t wish to work on it anymore. Can you buy something like that?

Yes, we can definitely buy any investment property that may be halfway through rehab. We’ll buy that property as-is; not an issue, and finish out the rehab. You can send it over to us at SimpleSaleCentralFlorida.com. We’ll take a look at it and then give you our thoughts, and we can typically give you an estimated offer in a couple of hours. Definitely, the same day and let you know what our thoughts are based on what you’ve told us. And if you could send us photos and then we can go from there.  

10. Can you buy my rental property if I still have tenants?

Yes, we definitely can buy properties with tenants or squatters or whatever the case might be. That’s not an issue for us. We’ll rarely buy properties with the tenants. Typically, if someone is wanting to sell property with tenants, it’s probably because there’s an issue with the tenants. A lot of times sellers can kind of gloss over the fact that maybe the tenants haven’t paid in a few months or whatever the case may be. We’d definitely want to be aware of what the situation is. 

But typically, we figure out what’s going on, but we would definitely buy properties with tenants, bad tenants, squatters, it doesn’t matter, we’ve done it. You could just send it by us and see if it’s something that we can work together on.

Wrapping Up

Okay, so that was it for the questions. Are there any other questions? I’m checking the comments. I don’t see anything.

So, I appreciate whoever is viewing, and hope this may have answered some of your questions. And if you do have any questions, you can reach out to us. You can call (407)338-4183, or go to our website: SimpleSaleCentralFlorida.com. Put in your address, request an offer, and then we will reach out and discuss your property with you to see what your options are. It’s not always the best option for clients to just sell the property for cash. Sometimes it’s to list the property. A decent amount of time it’s to list the property and get the best and the highest for it if there aren’t too many situations going on.

But as always, feel free to reach out and discuss your situation. We’ve really handled a lot of different situations at this point, so anything you have don’t be afraid to reach out and we’ll let you know if we can’t do it, but most of the time we can.

So, thank you all very much, and reach out with any questions. Thank you.