Author: shelbe

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

Hey, it’s Evan with Simple Sale Central Florida. We’re back here again for our February 2021 Distressed Home Q&A. We’re discussing some common distressed housing questions to help better educate clients that could be in these situations.

Simple Sale Central Florida’s mission is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. We work in an industry that can be very predatory. Some people will do or say anything to get a property under contract or have control via contract. They then try to manipulate the client into whatever is most beneficial to them. That may entail reducing the purchase price or not closing on the property last minute with false expectations. There are several other ways to unfortunately manipulate them.

We work to be accountable and credible, as you can see on our Google and Facebook reviews. We’ve had great experiences with our clients. We do everything we can to try to make sure that the client has a great experience. That is really what we strive for. So, let’s go ahead and get started with the questions:

1. Why do I keep getting calls and letters and postcards about my property?

In our industry, unfortunately there’s a lot of companies that do cold outreach. They’ll cold call, cold text or send postcards. We actually don’t do any of those things, but most companies in the industry do.

Most companies do cold outreach where they’re calling you weekly. You may be on a list because you have code violations on your home. People order those lists from the city, town or municipality then call everyone hoping that they’re looking to sell. Some people think that’s fine.

We aren’t trying to talk bad about those other companies, but we do not do that. We do what’s called inbound digital marketing. Someone will see our ad online and if they’re ready to sell their distressed property, they’ll reach out. But we don’t ever go cold calling potential clients that are in a distressed situation. To represent the company properly, cold calling someone, to us, is not the best way to go about it.

When someone’s ready to sell their house, they’ll go looking for someone to buy it. You don’t have to convince them that they need to sell. We let our reviews and our mission speak for itself. These distressed home sales are done one client at a time. We work very hard with each and every client that we are fortunate enough to work with. We try very hard to give them a great experience one client at a time.

I don’t know if I did a great job of answering that question, actually… You’re getting those because someone sees you on a list and they want to make you an offer. It’s very common in the business. So let’s go to the next question because I could ramble about that one all day.

2. What are the benefits of working with a cash home buyer?

There’s positives and negatives to everything. Working with someone who’s going to purchase your property for cash obviously has the benefit of speed. They’re probably going to be able to close in less than 30 days in almost all situations. They should be able to do that. If they’re not doing that, they’re probably not a credible company.

You’re also able to sell the property as-is to someone who’s going to buy it for cash. It won’t be based on a mortgage or note, where they have to qualify for funding at the bank. That boils down to you avoiding making repairs on your property to make it appraisal or inspection-worthy. You can sell it as-is, so there are some benefits in that nature.

In almost all situations if you don’t have a time constraint, if you don’t need to sell in the next 30 to 60 days and you’re just trying to look for the highest offer possible, I would always recommend you work with a brokerage. Hire them to go out and find the best offer possible.

For example, we are currently working with a client that actually should have closed today. It’s going to be pushed to Tuesday for various reasons. There’s open permits on the property that are taking longer than expected to get closed out. We did list that property for them. It had a probate issue, liens on the property, and open permits which we’re still working on.

Our team was able to resolve all those issues. We helped educate the client on what they were dealing with and what it was going to look like. We told them how much proceeds they were probably going to get and what the time line was. And we get paid a commission to bring our expertise to the table of educating them on that process.

There’s a false sense that if your property has liens or things like that that you can’t list it. That’s just not true. Our client reached out in September and we’re closing in February. There wasn’t really a time constraint, but there were various legal issues that needed to be taken care of. With our team and our attorneys, we got it done and walked them through the process and did a listing. Fortunately they netted much more than we ever really had hoped for. I was very, very happy with the outcome, and I hope they feel the same way.

In that situation our cash offer wasn’t competitive. We looked into purchasing that property but it just wasn’t a good fit for us from a cash-buying standpoint. But when you put it on the open market you never know why someone is looking at that property. Maybe it’s a rental for them and they’re able to pay more. In this situation that’s exactly what happened. Someone came in, paid cash and paid a lot more for it, so it was really great for them.

So there are some benefits but also at the same time, working with agents isn’t always bad. If you think you have to sell your home for cash, that may not always be the case.

3. What kinds of companies buy distressed properties?

There’s a few companies out there. As far as credible companies, there aren’t actually that many. There are several people that claim to buy and sell distressed properties, and there’s a handful online. For example Opendoor, Offerpad, or Zillow Offers, they do make offers on properties but they do not buy distressed properties like we do. So that’s where we are different. We will buy properties with liens, code violations, properties that need probate. A lot of those guys don’t.

So that is the difference. Like I said, there aren’t many credible companies out there that are currently doing what we do. To be honest it’s not easy – it can be very complicated. We know our niche in the market and we do everything we can to give the client a great experience.

4. What should I know about selling a house in poor condition?

Honestly the biggest thing is finding a company or person that knows what they’re talking about. Someone who can handle and actually purchase that property that can walk you through the process. There isn’t any magic to it or anything of that nature. I don’t know if there’s anything in particular like tips or anything like that. The biggest thing is just finding a good person or company to work with that understands the process. They should be able to take care of everything for you.

We try to educate our clients but we also try to make it as simple as possible for them. They don’t have to handle any of the aggravating things that come with selling a property in poor condition. The one thing is, you need to manage your expectations if it needs a lot of work.

Honestly, in our experience working with people, they’re pretty aware of what the situation is. If the property is in really poor condition, they’re typically not oblivious to what’s going on with it. On rare occasions people may be a little blind to the property’s current condition, but most times they’re aware.

5. Can you sell a house in foreclosure?

Yes, you definitely can. I would say maybe a third of clients are in some form of pre-foreclosure when they reach out to us. We are able to buy them every single time if there isn’t an issue. You shouldn’t have any issues.

If you find a retail buyer that’s trying to buy with a mortgage, that’s going to be a no-no. That’s probably not going to work out. You would definitely have to have someone that’s going to buy the house quickly for cash.

Read More: Selling Your Home Before Foreclosure

6. Is it possible to sell a house in probate in Florida?

I kind of already talked about this during my rant earlier. It is definitely possible to sell a house in probate. It’s possible to list a house in probate. In a lot of situations if it’s a probate deal, a listing is actually probably a better idea. You’re going to net more for it.

Like I said we have a brokerage, Simple Sale Realty. We can list properties throughout Central Florida. With probate deals, a lot of times we do that because our cash offer probably isn’t going to be competitive compared to a landlord that’s looking to pay a premium for a property because it’s right beside all of their other rentals.

It’s definitely possible to sell one, and in a lot of situations I would recommend that you list it. We can list it for you and take care of the probate. We have the team to get it done, and we can take care of any other issues out there.

7. What do I need to know before selling my home as-is?

That’s pretty similar to the other question about selling a house in poor condition. I think we kind of covered it already. Selling your house as-is with someone that isn’t quite helpful can be a stressful experience. Depending on the situation of the home, if there’s legal issues and things of that nature, a lot of times those have to get unraveled before the closing. That can become pretty stressful if you don’t have someone experienced or they’re not being truthful with you about the situation.

It goes back to what I’ve already said. You really have to work with someone that’s credible, a company or a person that’s credible. You can find reviews online that they’ve given their client great experiences, because without that it can be tough. It can be a bad experience so I would definitely say just do your research on a great company.

8. Why should I sell my house to Simple Sale instead of through a realtor?

It really just depends on your situation. If you’re looking to sell quickly and there’s legal issues, a distressed situation, or excessive repairs, we’re going to be very competitive. If you want to close a property in 3 weeks with a short inspection period, we’re going to be very competitive.

But, if you had an agent you were looking to use, they’re probably going to be able to get it done for you but the time lines typically differ. It’s more of a 60- to 90-day process because they’re vetting offers, getting offers, getting buyers under contract. As you may know, contracts fall out. Just because you get an offer for a price doesn’t mean it’s sold. In our business, people make a lot of offers and not a lot of people close. That’s just the reality of the business.

We’re proud when we get a property under contract and we get through the inspection period and we close. That’s one of our main promises to the client: we don’t back out last minute. It’s just not something we believe in. We don’t ask for price reductions last minute or anything like that. Re-trading on price, we do not do that, we will not do that. It goes against everything that we believe in.

9. Do I have to take everything from the property and clean it before closing?

No you do not, you absolutely do not. We’ve bought what people call hoarder houses and houses with bio-hazard issues. You don’t have to take anything from the house. You can leave whatever you don’t want and we hire crews to clean the property. It’s pretty simple. We just tell clients to take what they want and they can leave the rest.

We had a client in Haines City that recently cleaned most of the house out. It wasn’t really an expectation of him to do that, but I think he’s just a really nice guy. He just wanted to take the extra step of cleaning everything and he did a good job. We didn’t have to worry about it, but sometimes clients leave a lot of stuff and that’s totally fine.

10. Can you give me an example of a difficult home you’ve bought?

Hmm… There’s a lot, but I’m trying to think of the most recent. The one in Haines City was interesting. There was a title issue that we cleared up. In the last 2 or 3 months we bought a property that had 7 heirs. So there was a house where there was a husband and wife. The husband and wife then got divorced after having 4 kids.

They got divorced in the 70s or 80s and then the wife stayed in the house, she passed away in 2000. The husband moved to Pennsylvania, got married again, had a child, and died in Pennsylvania in 2002. So they both have ownership in this house and have 5 kids total. They both passed away. Some of the kids passed away and their kids had kids, so it was the original owners’ grandchildren that reached out.

So you can imagine how you get 7 heirs out of that situation. It took us over a year to untangle everything and find the heirs. We had to find people that didn’t even know they had an interest in the property and then we had heirs in 4 different states. But, we kept at it and we were able to close on it in December of 2020. So that one was a journey and it was a great experience.

As far as legal complexity, that may have been the most complex one. It was definitely the longest, but may have been the most complex one we have ever done. It’s just an example of how we just don’t give up, we keep at it. They wanted to sell the property and no one – literally no one’s crazy enough to untangle that and take the time. We had a 5-figure lawyer bill out of it that we had to pay, and we were at risk for because there was no guarantee that we were going to close at the end of the day.

So that’s what we do. That’s the business we’re in and we love helping clients get through these situations. We bought the property and will do well on it and that’s great too, but at the end of the day we got something done that no one else could. There were multiple other people that had tried and that had said they would get it done but they couldn’t. So that one was really great. It was a good experience.

Wrapping Up

So, I think that’s it. Are there any other questions? Anyone out there? I don’t see any comments or questions.

So as always, thanks for viewing. You can call us at 407-338-4183. You can also just go to our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com. Just fill out the form, you’ll put in your address, your email and your phone. That will allow us to reach out to you and discuss your situation and see if we’re a good fit.

We are Central Florida’s trusted distressed home buyer and we pride ourselves on bringing transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. I appreciate you tuning in and listening and we will be back next month to answer more of these questions. Feel free to reach out any time! Thanks. Bye.

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 here this month for our monthly Distressed Home Q&A, our January Q&A. Just to quickly introduce myself, I’m Evan Shelley, I run Simple Sale.

We buy distressed properties throughout Central Florida. That’s Tampa, St. Pete, Pinellas & Hillsborough counties. We even look down in Manatee, Bradenton area, and from there we look at Orlando, Orange County, even Osceola, Seminole Counties. Then on the east coast, Brevard County, including the cities of Melbourne, Titusville, Cocoa, all the way up to Palm Beach.

Like I said, we buy and sell distressed properties throughout Central Florida. We also do list properties if the situation fits. If your property isn’t extremely distressed, there are instances where listing your property makes more sense, so just wanted to put that out there. We do have a brokerage called Simple Sale Realty where we can list your property, and in some situations that does make more sense for the client.

The mission of the company is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. What that means is we are in a predatory industry where people will try to manipulate their client to get the most money possible, and what we do – yes, we try to make money, a business by definition cannot function without making money – but with everything we do we keep the client in mind. When we make a commission on a deal where we buy and sell a property and make a profit, we feel as if we’ve done everything we can for the client and it’s under our risk tolerance to where we felt that we bought the property at a price that we could make money and the client got an offer that was fair.

With that being said we’ll go on into the questions.

1. What’s different about selling a distressed home vs. a regular one?

If you have a distressed property you’re probably aware of it. To define distressed that means a property with excessive repairs, legal issues, in pre-foreclosure where you’re late on mortgage payments, you can be late on HOA payments for that matter. We recently bought a property that was a couple years late on HOA payments. That was a problem that would define distressed. A regular home is one that needs very little work, typically cosmetic work.

I actually just left a house earlier today that is going to be a listing because it needed very little work. There are some issues that are being worked through with a contractor, but it’s not to the point where this person needs to sell the property at a lower price to someone that’s going to give them a cash offer. It makes more sense to take the time to list it. They’re not in a rush and they’re going through a probate so we are helping them handle the probate with an attorney. We are going to take care of the few repair issues and list the property for them, and they’re going to net a lot more.

As I was speaking about the goal of the company, bringing transparency and accountability: we felt that listing the property made a lot more sense in this situation and the client will net tens of thousands of dollars more.

The difference between a distressed and a regular property is the amount of repairs, legal issues or something that you can’t overcome. You may need to sell the house very, very quickly – you don’t have time to list it and vet offers and let people walk the property. With a regular one, you can list the property, you can take time, you can let people view it. It’s not an issue, there isn’t anything extreme or extraordinary that’s wrong with the house.

2. What does it mean to sell property as-is? Do I need a realtor?

To sell a property as-is can mean something as extreme as you leave the property, you’re moving. We had a lady move to Tennessee and she just left the property literally as it was. She took the things she wanted, she left the rest of it.

That’s the extreme version of selling a property as-is you just kind of leave furniture, everything and you take what you want and you leave the rest and we take it with the repairs needed and then we’ll buy it as-is.

You can sell a property with a realtor as-is. The difference in the problem becomes the selling of property as-is with an agent or realtor is the timeline. If you’re wanting to sell the property in 30 days or less, you’re probably not best suited for listing as-is. You may get some offers that will close that quickly but sometimes it can take a while to get the best and highest offer.

We have a property that we sold as-is with our brokerage and I think we ended up taking maybe 60 days to really vet out offers, because in this industry you get a lot of offers that aren’t quite real. It’s just the state of the industry that we’re in right now. You’ll get offers that aren’t real and they’ll go into contract and they won’t close and then you’re back under contract with someone else and they won’t close. Then if you want to vet all that out you might as well go ahead and tell yourself you’re not going to close that property for 60 days. That’s just part of the process.

So if you don’t have that kind of time you should avoid the realtor route, but if you do, then you should definitely go that realtor route in most as-is situations.

3. What do cash offers for homes entail?

It really depends on the company you’re working with. With our company, a firm cash offer typically entails us have thoroughly vetted the property, we feel confident in the property, we’ve taken an inspection period – anywhere from 3-14 days depending on the property (and in some cases we do zero-day inspection periods) – and we’ve moved through the inspection period and we are ready to close.

With some other companies, they’ll make you cash offers without ever seeing the house. Knowing very little, they’ll just look it up online and throw you a number. It really depends on the company.

Going back to the mission of transparency and accountability, we try to make the process as clear as possible. With that firm cash offer that we make, we will tell you when we’re in this to close on X date.

Some other companies aren’t quite that confident in their offer so you just have to vet out those companies. Typically you can do that by reviewing the companies online, looking at the reviews and things of that nature.

4. When is the best time to sell a distressed house?

In almost all cases that I’ve seen it’s better to sell the house when you’re needing to sell it. I’ve seen cases where people refuse to want to sell for whatever reason. They say, “Well, you know, the offer isn’t high enough. We want your offer plus $30,000” or whatever the case may be. They have unrealistic expectations and things of that nature.

I’ve seen people become very emotional about it, then 3 months later they’re in a worse spot for whatever reason. Maybe there’s excessive repairs to the property, there’s a leaky roof and they don’t want to sell it for less than X price. They can’t get that price and the condition of the property is greatly worsened over that period of time. Then they come back 3 months later and things are worse.

So if your property is truly distressed, there’s some real issues, the honest answer is probably today. The day you think ”I need to sell this property” is probably the best time. It’s not going to get better unless you have the money for the repairs. Then I would highly recommend you make the repairs and then sell the house. In that situation that would be your best alternative.

If you have the money for the repairs and you understand construction and contracting, hiring contractors and vetting them, the scope of work, then you should fix the property. Make it a house that’s no longer distressed and then sell it.

5. I inherited a home, what are some pros and cons to renting vs. selling it?

If you inherit a property, let’s assume that there’s nothing owed on it. Renting the property isn’t a bad idea. If you know how to handle and vet tenants, or you have a very good property management company, that is not a bad idea at all to rent out the property.

The cons are if you try to self-manage, you’re going to have a lot of stress in your life for that rent payment every month. Just for general maintenance of the property, making sure your tenants pay rent, making sure that there’s nothing going on at the property that you wouldn’t approve of, things of that nature. It just can be a constant stress vs. selling it.

The pro of selling it is you’ll get your money out of the house quickly. The con is you don’t have that passive income that comes from renting it. I would never say renting is a bad option. Just be prepared and understand the responsibility that comes with renting a property. It can be time consuming and comes with its own headaches. However, there’s ways to mitigate those if you educate yourself.

So it really depends on your situation. If you don’t need the money I would recommend you rent it and find a great property manager. We can refer you to people if you’re in the Central Florida area, I would go that route.

6. Do you have any tips for selling a home when you’re going through a divorce?

We’ve handled a few of these and the biggest thing, the most important thing, in my mind, is making sure that you’re on the same page with that other person that you’re getting divorced from. I’ve been in situations where I talked with one of the spouses and they’re on a totally different page than the other. We’re talking about price and moving forward and the other person is saying “I don’t want to sell” or “I don’t want that price for it I want some other price.”

A lot of the time it just doesn’t work out and those people end up just fire-saling it to some random person down the road for whatever they’ll give, which is not ideal. So I would say it’s really getting on the same page with that other person. Even though you’re going through a difficult relationship you need to just take the time to be on the same page and understand “OK, we’re gonna sell this thing. We want this for it, we agree. Let’s sell it.”

Otherwise, you’re just going to spin your wheels and talk to people and try to get it sold and nothing’s ever going to happen. I would just have a clear plan and obviously, you know, a good attorney.

7. Can I sell my house in foreclosure?

We purchase properties in pre-foreclosure all the time. There are definitely instances where there’s a foreclosure, and you can sell your property and get out of foreclosure.

There are variables there. How much do you owe on the mortgage? Is there any equity in the house? If not, there are various ways you might be able to get it sold and make some money. We could discuss that with you, or another company you’re talking with can discuss that with you. Hopefully they’ll help you understand different ways you can sell in foreclosure even if you don’t have any equity.

What “no equity” means is you may owe more on the mortgage than what the home’s actually worth. There are ways to get around that and possibly put money in your pocket. We can definitely talk with you about that.

8. My house is in very poor condition, but I can’t fix it and I need to sell it. Can you help?

That’s what we do. The majority of the properties that we buy are in very poor condition for various reasons. That’s exactly what we do. We buy those properties as-is, no repairs. You don’t have to clean the property up. We’ll just buy it as-is with all the repairs on it. That’s exactly what we do.

9. How can I sell a property in probate?

Simple Sale deals with a lot of probate deals and essentially the first step is getting an attorney that you trust. We have attorneys that we use for all our probate deals. We’re very comfortable working through the various complications that can come with a probate deal. If you have a trusted attorney I would say reach out to them. If you don’t, reach out to us. We can recommend one to you and we can help you through that process.

Some of the big things are how many heirs are there? Are all the heirs wanting to sell the property? Do all the heirs want to sell it for around the same amount? Things of that nature. You really want to get on the same page with the heirs. If it’s only you, you just need an attorney you trust and to find a buyer for the property.

So that can be us or another company that you trust. Selling a property in probate does have its complications, but if you work with someone who actually works in probates and works with attorneys regularly on probate deals then it can be pretty simple on your end.

10. Can you sell a house with a lien on it?

So you definitely can sell a house with a lien on it. We’ve bought many properties that do have liens. We typically pay those liens off prior to closing or at closing those will get paid off, but also we have bought properties and closed without paying the liens.

In mid 2020 we bought a property that had $364,000 in liens on it. The house was worth much, much less than that. We renegotiated those liens over the course of 6 months down to just a few thousand dollars. We can really handle any type of situation and we’re prepared to take the risk of negotiation.

If you do have a lien or substantial liens feel free to reach out to us because we can handle those and we will take those risks with a property.

Wrapping Up

With that being said I think that was the last question that I’m going to answer today in our January Q&A. I do not see any questions in the comment box, so I’m just going to go ahead and close it out.

Thanks for watching this Q&A. You can reach us at 407-338-4183 and if you want to refer your distressed property you can go to simplesalecentralflorida.com and leave your info and we will reach out to you and talk with you about your property and see if we’re a good fit. Not all properties are a good fit just depending upon the situation.

We like to work with people who want to work with us and we want to continue to expand our mission of bringing transparency and accountability to distressed home sales and taking care of our clients with every decision we make.

Thank you all very much and have a great weekend!

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 here for our monthly Q&A. It’s December, heading into the end of the year and we just wanted to make an introduction.

Simple Sale Central Florida’s mission is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. We buy properties throughout Central Florida – currently that’s Orlando, Tampa, Titusville, Orange County, Hillsborough, Pinellas County, Brevard, Seminole, Osceola and everything in between.

Simple Sale specializes in buying properties that have issues such as excessive repairs, probates, liens, judgments, foreclosures. Anything that isn’t typical in a transaction in buying or selling a house. We specialize in taking care of that. We also list properties for people that have a distressed property and that are in a rush to sell. We can list your property and work to take care of issues and help you manage your distressed home sale.

With that being said, we’ll get into the first question. I think we have 10 or so questions here that we’ll go through.

1. What is a distressed property?

As I was just saying, we typically define distressed as a property that has excessive repairs, or legal issues like probate, liens, judgments, foreclosures, anything of that nature, or disputes. Anything that brings complexity to a home sale is what we consider a distressed property.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be in bad condition, it may just be a property that has a complexity to be able to sell it. Maybe there’s a lien on it, maybe there’s ownership by a person that’s deceased. Or maybe there’s ownership by a person that doesn’t want to sell but you and other people need to sell your ownership of the property.

Whatever the case may be, we define all of those things as distressed because it makes the situation complex and it makes the situation confusing for the average home seller. That’s how we like to think about distressed property.

2. How can I get rid of my distressed home?

Really, there are a couple of options. (A) You can go out and find someone to try to buy it. As I was talking about, distressed may mean that there’s legal issues on the property. If there’s legal issues on the property a lot of buyers will not take on the property. You may have to get an attorney involved to take care of the legal issues. So one way is to go out and find buyers.

Option (B) is to work with an agent that specializes in distressed property cases. The benefit of working with a distressed property buyer specifically is because they’ll specialize in cases of distressed property. They’ll be used to working with attorneys on legal issues, working with HOAs on HOA foreclosure issues, HOA lien issues, working with the stop holds, things of that nature.

If you’re trying to sell your distressed property, you really want to be specific about who you find, that they specialize in those types of things. We often see buyers that don’t know how to handle those situations. You’ll go through 5 buyers and none of them are able to close on the property because they’re not used to dealing with those types of situations and do not want to figure out how to deal with those situations. We see that a lot.

Make sure that whoever you work with, whether it be Simple Sale or another company, that they do in fact specialize in dealing with distressed properties.

3. How does a lien work?

A lien is essentially put on a property, and whenever it is sold or changes hands, the title company and the underwriters for the title insurance will see on the title commitment that there is a lien on the property and that company or that person is wanting to get paid for what they believe to be money owed.

It can be a mechanic’s lien or an IRS lien, among others. A mechanic’s lien comes from a contractor or a vendor of some kind. Let’s say you buy doors for your house and you don’t pay for them. The vendor will put a mechanic’s lien on the property for their money owed for selling you the doors you never paid them back for. Things of that nature. They’ll put it on the property in hopes that they eventually get paid back if the property ever does sell. I would say a majority of houses that we deal with have some form of a lien.

Typically what we see are liens in the form of judgments owed to the county or city in which it’s in. That may be for things as simple as utilities to something bigger as lawyer fees or even IRS liens.

Essentially a lien just protects or helps a person or company feel that they’ll get paid back eventually for what work they feel they completed. Liens are negotiable in some instances. If a contractor wants to be paid back for work completed and you think he charged you too much so that’s why you didn’t pay him, maybe he’s charging you $10,000. Maybe you can negotiate those liens down to $7,000 or $8,000 or $5,000 – that is possible.

However, some liens are not, like IRS liens typically are not negotiable. That’s essentially the gist of how it works.

4. Do tax liens go away after you sell a property?

In almost all cases when we close on a property, those tax liens will be taken care of. They’ll be paid before closing on the property and they won’t go with you and they won’t be attached to the property. Depending on what type of tax lien, if it’s property tax liens they’ll be paid out at close and taken out of your disbursement for taxes owed that you haven’t paid.

In very rare cases we would buy a property that did have tax liens for whatever reason, but usually those are going to be paid and they will not follow you. Typically tax liens will attach to the house and they won’t attach to you personally. So, we do sell houses with tax liens. They will not travel with you to the next property you buy and they won’t attach to you personally. In all situations they are attached to the property

5. Should I sell my house as-is or fix it up?

We get this question a lot. I talk with people a lot about if they should sell their property as-is or fix it up and it really depends on your expertise in rehabbing property. If you’re confident in your ability to rehab a property or you know people that can rehab a property, I would always suggest that you fix it up yourself and sell it because you are going to get more money.

The problem we see – we’ll buy properties from people who tried to fix it up themselves and they got bad contractors, people they thought they could trust and they couldn’t. They charged them too much, they couldn’t complete the work, etc., etc. Make sure if you’re going to take the journey of fixing up your property that you are confident in your ability to make sure it gets completed with trustworthy contractors because it can be pretty bad.

We’ve seen people get taken advantage of when they try to fix up their property to get more money out of it and things go bad. They can be out a lot of money with very little work completed. It really depends on your expertise so that would be the deciding factor on whether you fix it up or just sell it as-is.

I would say for the majority of people Just selling the property as-is is going to be a lot less stressful and easier on the person. Even though you will definitely get less for it and you won’t probably net the same amount of money. You have to think about if things go bad when you are fixing it up, do you want to take that risk and do you feel confident that you can get it completed and get the house sold. It really depends on the person’s situation.

6. I found out the home I inherited needs probate. What should I expect?

We deal with a ton of probate properties. Sometimes the people know, but sometimes we are under a purchase contract and we go to buy the property and we realize that it does need a probate and the seller didn’t even know. We do get those situations, we’re dealing with 2 currently.

You should expect that it’s going to take anywhere from 30-90 days to go through the courts if it’s a simple probate, but we’ve had probates go for a year. However, in most situations it’s 30-90 days depending on how complicated the probate is.

If you were to work with Simple Sale on your probate you would be working with our attorneys in-house and essentially everything would be taken care of. We would just give you progress updates and ask you for documentation as needed. If you want to do a probate yourself you’ll go find a probate real estate lawyer that specializes in that and they’ll walk you through the process.

That’s really your 2 different options and you typically cannot sell the house you cannot close on the sale of a house until the probate. You get a motion for sale of real estate or real property approved by the courts which is late in the probate process and at that point typically the personal representative will be able to sell the property through a personal representative’s deed. That’s a very high level explanation on how the process would work.

7. How do you handle taxes on home sales?

This is an interesting one because without us explaining to the client how taxes work and that they’re going to be paid, people don’t really think about that money coming out.

For easy explanation, let’s say you sell the property at the end of June – you sell it July 1. You’ve owned it for 6 months of the year. When you sell that property if you’ve already paid the taxes for the year then you will be reimbursed one-half of the taxes that you paid. If you close on July 1 you won’t own that property for the last half of the year. If you paid $1,000 in taxes you’ll be reimbursed $500 in taxes because you paid out for the year.

Let’s say you haven’t paid taxes for the year and you’re late, it’s July 1 and you close on the house. You are selling the house for $100,000. $500 is going to be taken out of your proceeds to pay for the taxes that you haven’t paid yet.

You, as a seller will always cover the taxes for the period of time which you owned the property. If you owned the property for the first half of the year, you’re obligated to pay those taxes and a lot of people don’t think about that. We try to disclose that very early in the process that those are costs. Most people understand but some people don’t and it’s an expense that they’re not expecting.

There can be confusion but it’s something that if you own the property you’re obligated to pay those taxes. Then, for the rest of the year, the buyer – if it’s Simple Sale or someone else – would pay those taxes.

8. Do you have any tips or advice for selling a house that needs repairs?

I think this is pretty similar to an earlier question. The easiest things to do that can help are just make sure the house is clean and that junk is removed. Very obvious stuff, like cosmetic fixes. Really easy stuff is just painting walls. That can give the house a better appeal.

Maybe it costs you $1,000 to repaint, but it may bring you $5,000 because the feel of the house is improved. Let’s say the walls are yellow and you repaint them to a neutral color. It could quite possibly bring you a lot more for the house than what it costs. Maybe it’s $1,000 and it brings you $5,000 more dollars or something of that nature. Even though you may need repairs, taking little steps like that can help you with bringing out more equity in the property on sale.

It’s just small things like that. If there’s junk around inside and outside the property, take $1,000 and clean the property. Hire someone to clean the property and junk the stuff that needs to be thrown away. That, maybe it costs you $1,000 but it can save you $5,000. It can bring you $5,000 just because the appeal of the house is better. That’s really the biggest one and the easiest way to bring out more equity in the property.

9. Is it possible to sell a distressed home fast?

Yes, of course. It is possible, it depends on why it is distressed. If it’s distressed for legal issues, sometimes those can take a while. There’s also situations where it looks like we might need a probate and we end up figuring out how to avoid a probate. Distressed properties can be sold fast and probably the fastest sales are ones that just need repairs.

You can absolutely sell a distressed property quickly as long as there aren’t some outstanding complex legal issues. If there are, you’ll want to work with a company that handles those issues often and can fix them quickly. You can get a buyer that hasn’t worked with those issues. It may take twice as long to get through it just because they don’t know how to handle the situation. You want to be very cautious in who you pick to close the property with, whether it be an agent or a buyer.

10. What are the typical closing costs?

So this is a good one because an easy rule of thumb is 2%. If you’re selling a house for $100,000, typical closing costs will be 2% of that. In almost all of our transactions, we pay closing costs. I think most home buyers, more specifically cash home buyers, they pay closing costs as well, so it’s common.

If you’re selling your property on the market with an agent, let’s say you list it with Simple Sale Realty, you would pay closing costs and those are typically 2%. If you hire an agent they’ll typically charge 5-6% total which is 2.5 or 3% per agent. One for the listing agent and one for the buyer’s agent.

A good rule of thumb is 7-8% of the total cost, if you’re listing the property, will come out of your proceeds. That may sound like a lot, but if you are lucky to have time on your side and you list the property, you’re almost in all situations going to get more money for it if you remain patient and wait for offers to come. So typical closing costs 2% for closing costs, and then 5-6% for commissions.

11. I inherited my dad’s house and he was a bit of a hoarder. How can I sell his home?

For hoarder houses that we’ve bought, we’ll just buy the property as-is. We’ve had very complex situations. We once had a house that was in probate and a hoarder house. There was also a bio-hazard issue in which someone died in the property and wasn’t found for a few weeks.

We bought that property as-is, no contingencies. I think that one in particular we bought with no inspection period. We did one or two walk-throughs, bought the property as-is, did the probate and closed on the it, no changes. A biohazard team cleaned it up and we had a team clear out the property. You can absolutely sell that property.

I don’t know how many people would go to those types of lengths if it’s a complex situation. We do, Simple Sale does. I don’t know how many other buyers do deal with that. Other cash buyers will buy a hoarder house assuming that there’s no other complexities on top of it. Besides that you’re not going to be able to list it. In most situations you’re going to want to do an outright cash sale to a distressed home buyer.

Wrapping Up

So, that was the last question. If there’s any other questions – I don’t think I’ve seen any comments with questions – I see Dontae commented but I don’t see any questions. If there are no other questions we’ll go ahead and close this one out.

Once again this is the December Q&A. I appreciate people who are watching this and who view the recording. We always upload it on Facebook and on the website and on various social media. You can reach us at 321-732-6477 or you can go to our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com.

Our mission, as I said at the beginning, is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales whether that be we buy your property we clear up your lien issues or we list your distressed property. We want the client to have a transparent experience with an accountable
company that will work with them to get them through a stressful situation.

Once again, you can reach us at 407-338-4183 or at simplesalecentralflorida.com and put in your information. Whether it’s you, whether it’s a family member if it’s a friend you can input that information and we will do our best to help you out with your situation.

Alright. Thanks. Bye.

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 for our monthly Q&A where we answer some commonly asked questions from our clients that we work with throughout Central Florida.

Just to have a little introduction to Simple Sale, we buy distressed properties throughout Central Florida. We bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales in an industry where there’s many predatory tactics, and we work with our clients to be transparent and accountable during the process. Simple Sale buys properties throughout Central Florida from Tampa to Titusville to Orlando and anywhere in between.

Let’s get going. We have 10 or so questions here to go through.

1. I inherited a house with my siblings but we can agree on what to do with it, what can we do?

We see these situations a lot, where there’s multiple siblings and they don’t know what to do with their property. Depending upon how serious the disagreement is, sometimes properties never get sold because siblings can’t agree. In some situations they do, and a lot of it is just communication between the siblings, and we can help facilitate a lot of that.

There are also legal actions you can take in order to sell a distressed property, but that’s not the preferred route. You would much rather just have a good dialog between the siblings and figure out what the issues differences are in order to get the distressed property sold.

If you do go the legal route, it’s usually a 6 or 12 month process where you essentially go to a judge and request that they sell the property for you. It does take time, 6-12 months, and can be costly with lawyers as well. Typically the easiest way is to just communicate with all the siblings and come to an agreement.

2. Can I sell my rental property as-is?

Yes, of course. Rental properties, with or without tenants, you can sell those properties with no problems. If it does have tenants then there’s usually going to be requests for leases, proof of rent being paid and things of that nature. You can absolutely sell your rental property as-is in its current condition to a cash buyer. That’s not an issue at all.

There would be an issue if you had a tenant that was not paying rent and refused to leave. The property becomes a lot less desirable, but in our experience you can still sell that property. We’ve bought properties like that. The risk that the buyer has to take will reduce the price of the property, so you won’t be able to sell the property for as much as if the property was vacant. You can still absolutely sell your rental property as-is.

3. Can I sell a condemned property?

You absolutely can sell condemned properties. We’ve bought many condemned properties, condemned due to code violations or code violations, unsafe living conditions. Typically things of that nature will lead to a property becoming condemned. You can sell it in that condition.

Typically, there’s going to be legal issues that you have to figure out that comes with it being condemned but there shouldn’t be an issue. It is probably less desirable for a buyer, but the fact that it is condemned doesn’t mean that you can’t sell it.

4. I’m in pre-foreclosure, but I don’t know what to do because of the moratorium. Do you have any advice?

If you are in pre-foreclosure and your mortgage is insured by the federal government, the moratorium (as of right now) ends for you at the end of this year. If you’re in that situation, I highly suggest you figure out how to (A) sell the property, or (B) get the mortgage current.

If you get the mortgage current, obviously you don’t have any more issues. If that isn’t an option then, you would definitely want to sell the property so the foreclosure doesn’t ruin your credit. Having a plan on when you want to get the property sold is imperative. As of November 13th, you have 45 or so days to get that property sold.

I would highly recommend figuring out a plan to sell it or become current on the mortgage. Once the moratorium is lifted, the bank will have the right to foreclose on the property. This will ruin your credit and you’ll lose your property. I would say, in a lot of situations, if you sell your property before that point you’re going to get a lot more money for it. Once a property goes to foreclosure auction you probably won’t get anything out of it depending on how much money is left on your mortgage. The biggest thing is figuring out if it’s possible for you to become current. If not, then figuring out a plan to sell it.

5. I feel like my house is taking over my life and I just don’t want to deal with it. Can you help me?

We do work with a lot of clients that have had a property for a long period of time. It’s become a burden to them and they just want to get rid of it. They want to get rid of the problems, I think. You don’t just see cases like that with houses. It’s their house, it’s their car, it’s whatever. If it becomes a constant problem, you would rather get rid of it than continue to deal with the issues.

Typically in those situations it’s just better to sell it and get rid of the stress, because it’s not worth the stress it’s putting on you. We can help you by purchasing the property or we can help you list that property and get it sold. It depends on your situation and your property.

We can absolutely help you with those situations and it’s not uncommon. It is quite common to see people who have gotten to that point with their property. It’s not anything unusual or anything to be embarrassed about for sure. We can absolutely help you, without a doubt.

6. Do you charge any fees for handling my property’s problems?

No, we don’t. In a lot of scenarios we end up helping the person with their situation and we don’t end up working together for whatever reason. The person may just want to figure out what their situation even is. We’ll help them figure it out and we may not end up working together. Our goal is bringing transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. If we can help someone, we’re continuing the mission of the company and that’s OK with us.

We don’t charge any fees. We give that sort of consulting and specialist information away for free. In a lot of scenarios, those people may not work with us but some of them do. It’s just part of the mission of the company. Fees you’d typically expect when selling your home yourself include legal advice from lawyers or property repairs. In terms of legal issues like liens, figuring out what the real situation is, we can help you through that with no fees at all.

7. I live in another state, can I sell you a house I own without having to go there?

We have definitely dealt with situations where the person is out of state. Most times they’ll mail us a key and we’ll go look at the property and see if it’s something we can help with. That’s really the easiest way to do it.

We’ve talked with people and based on what they told us, we’ve given them an estimated offer. If we’re on the same page, we’ll sign a contract, they’ll mail us a key and we will work to move forward and close on the property. So no, you absolutely do not have to be in the state. You don’t even have to show up for closings. It can all be done remotely. You absolutely don’t have to go there; it can all be done remotely.

8. I want to sell my home in Fort Lauderdale, can you still help me?

We would definitely consider looking at the property. We are currently just focusing on Central Florida, but we would look at it and we can help you with your situation and still possibly buy the property. It would really just depend on your situation in particular but we would definitely consider it, but it’s not our core area at the moment. We also can help you list the property as well and possibly help you work with someone in the Fort Lauderdale area that might be more convenient.

9. Are there any problems you can’t work with?

There are very few problems that we can’t work with. In most situations, we can figure out the problem. I would say most of the time the reason we don’t work with people is because there’s an emotional or a price issue.

As far as legal problems or problems with the property, there are very few situations we haven’t been able to figure out. We’ve found people that couldn’t be found that needed to sign a deed. We’ve worked through probates with 7 heirs, some of which didn’t know each other and we found them.

We can figure out most problems with a house or the legal issues. Oftentimes the problem is that the person doesn’t know if they want to sell or not, or they want a price that’s just not attainable and that’s OK, that’s their choice. That’s just what we’ve noticed over time. Any issues we can tackle from a legal standpoint, we almost always figure them out.

10. How fast can you buy my home?

We actually had a question from a guy on our team, Dontae: “How long would it take to close on a property once the contract is signed?” From the point of signing the contract, in our experience it’s 30 days or less. I would say 89% of the time it’s 30 days or less, and many times it’s around 21 days. But almost always it’s 30 days or less.

If we haven’t closed in 30 days, there’s a legal issue we’re trying to figure out and we’re at the mercy of the municipality, whatever county or city that it may be in. We’re ordering documents, we’re working with lawyers to figure out the issue. But if it’s something a simple transaction where there aren’t legal issues there’s no reason we go more than 3 weeks really in almost any situation. 30 days or less is 89% of the time. If you appear to have small legal issues or no legal issues, you can expect to close in 30 days or less.

OK, that was the last question. I think we just answered Dontae’s question there. “How long would it take to close on a property once the contract is signed?” It’s going to be 30 days or less a lot of times, around that 3 week mark is pretty common. Yes, you’re welcome, Dontae. Glad you came on. So if there’s not any other questions, we’re going to go ahead and close this one out. This is our November Q&A.

Wrapping Up

As always, we buy properties throughout Central Florida. Orlando, Titusville, Tampa, so Brevard County, Orange County Pinellas County, Hillsborough County Ocala, Kissimmee. We really – anywhere in Central Florida we consider. Not to mention the Gainesville area, we also look there.

If you have a property in one of those areas we can absolutely take a look and see if we’re a good fit. If we are, then it’s what we call 3 Simple Steps. We’ll talk about the property with you online, then we’ll talk about the property with you either via phone or email, we’ll get information from you, we’ll give you an estimated offer. That’s the first step.

If we are on the same page with price for the estimated offer and we’re in the ballpark, we’ll come and do a walk-through of the property, typically within 24 hours, and make sure that the property is in the condition that we discussed and then from there. That’s the second step and the third step would be making the offer and getting closed.

Just 3 Simple Steps. We like to keep it as simple as possible and if you have any questions at all, feel free to go to our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com. You can call us at 407-338-4183.

That’s it for this month and we’ll catch you next month. Thanks everybody!

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 October Q&A. Covering questions that we commonly hear with clients that we work with throughout Central Florida.

Simple Sale Central Florida is a distressed home buyer. Distressed homes typically mean foreclosures, legal issues, excessive repairs – properties that need to be sold very, very quickly for whatever reason. That really defines the residential distressed industry.

We work in places like Orlando, Tampa, Titusville, Melbourne. Orange County, Hillsborough, Brevard, Pinellas, Osceola, Seminole County, Volusia. Many, many counties throughout Central Florida. We’re also looking at the Gainesville area to start buying properties there as well. Let’s get started with the questions.

1. I got stuck in a contract with another company and now they’re offering me way less than before, what can I do?

This is pretty common  in the industry. A company will offer you what you’re asking for the property, whatever it may be. Let’s say it’s $100,000. They’ll get you into the contract, move forward and make you feel comfortable that the deal will close. At some point before closing, sometimes a day or days before closing, they’ll request reductions or what they call credits. They’ll say “oh, I didn’t know the roof was that way” or whatever, and they’ll request a credit. Those credits can be anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 to $20,000.

As a seller, you’re emotionally and financially involved in the process, possibly trying to plan your life out. A lot of times those tactics work because someone is dedicated to closing. They want to move on with their life and just get rid of this distressed property, this stressful situation.

In that situation what you can do – hopefully, first off, the buyer has a deposit down, so you should have the right to that deposit. If they’re trying to offer you less and they’re not willing to close, you should have the right to that deposit. You should also contact the title company and tell them that this transaction is not going to happen because they’re changing the offer price. Tell them that you’re wanting to cancel the contract.

Because you’re telling the buyer you don’t want to close now, things could get pretty hostile, I would contact the title company directly. I’d possibly have a lawyer call the buyer and the title company and show them you’re serious. You’re not taking less for your property than what you agreed to. You went through an inspection period and everything checked out and now they want to change the offer price for reasons that should have been mentioned during the inspection period.

At that point it can become a legal issue and they can threaten to put liens on your property or what they call memorandums, but you’re in the right. You’re not in the wrong. The buyer may try to make you feel like you’re in the wrong but you’re not. It isn’t your fault, it’s just a tactic that companies in this industry use and they do it on purpose, unfortunately.

2. The foreclosure moratorium is the only thing keeping me in my home. What can I do when it’s over and I’m still behind on payments?

The moratorium ended for a small percentage of people that have private mortgages on their properties. We haven’t talked with any of those people to see how those foreclosures are coming along or if any foreclosures have been filed. I personally don’t know any sellers or have had any clients like that.

It really depends on your situation and how much you owe on the property. Let’s say the property is worth $100,000 and you owe $100,000, and you’re going to walk away with nothing. Depending upon your situation, if you’re already in foreclosure and someone offers you the money to get out, it seems like a logical conclusion to go ahead and take that offer, but there are options outside of that. You can try to re-negotiate with the bank. Those processes can be difficult, but it’s possible that they would negotiate with you to see if you could get a lower payment or if they can give you an extension of, you know, 69 days. You can start those dialogues, because if you really need to stay in that home for whatever reason, there are other options than just selling.

If you are just trying to get out of it and you can get out of the foreclosure without it hurting your credit, that may be your best option. But it really, really just depends. It’s also possible for you to have someone take over your mortgage and make the payments and take possession of the property and make your payments for you. You move on with your life, assuming you don’t want to buy another property with a mortgage. They’ll clear up the foreclosure and continue making the payments.

In those situations, a lot of times investors will pay the mortgage payment and rent out the property. They’ll pay down the mortgage over time – over 5, 10, 20 years. Eventually that mortgage will get paid off and you can move on with your life without having to worry about it anymore because the person or investor has an obligation to continue paying that.

I think I answered that one pretty well, but it’s a situation-by-situation basis. If you want more information, just reach out on the website simplesalecentralflorida.com. We can evaluate your situation and better understand what you’re working with. The principal owed, how far behind you are on payments, things of that nature really matter. You could also consult with a lawyer, that’s another option. They could really understand your situation and point you in the right direction.

3. Will my house be worth more if I take care of the legal issues myself??

Absolutely. The legal issues on a property can mean big, big differences in what it’s worth. If you have what they call a broken chain of title, the house essentially can’t be sold. If it is sold, then the person that’s buying it from you isn’t actually taking full interest in the property. They’re probably buying some less than 100% interest in the property and they don’t even know it. When you take care of those legal issues yourself, the property will most likely be worth more.

In our experience, legal issues can start as simple as $300. We have one property right now that we’ve been working on since May 2019 and it’s closer to $10,000 in legal bills. It’s not finished, but we should be this month or next. So $300 all the way up to $10,000+ in legal bills.

If you have the money and a lawyer you trust, it will definitely increase the value of your property by more than what you pay. That’s something to keep in mind. It’s all about having the legal team there that you trust to get the legal issue resolved. Also having the money and the patience to be able to deal with it because legal issues can take anywhere from a few days to years. The one we’re working on right now we’ve been filed in the courts for 10 months or so. It can take a long time.

4. Is there any way I can sell my distressed home using a realtor?

Yes, you can, it’s possible. Typically, realtors or agents have a hard time understanding the situation because they aren’t investors. They may try to sell your property for less than what it’s worth, over-price it, or give you advice on that specific situation that isn’t necessarily accurate. I’m not saying they’re lying to you or they’re uninformed. Realtors are very well-informed and most agents are very well-informed, they just haven’t seen those problems before.

For example, you may have a legal issue and they’re pointing in directions that aren’t the most efficient. That’s not always the case and you can totally sell your distressed home that way. I would try to find someone who’s an agent and an investor that can deal with those issues. Someone who knows those issues and can clear them up and put it on the open market, like an MLS, so you get the money you deserve for the property.

5. Should I shop around when I’m looking to sell my home?

Absolutely. Some clients reach out to us and ask us questions like “Are there other people that do this?” or “Are there other companies?” Or they say “I’m actively looking at other companies.” We highly recommend you talk to other companies. Get to know them, their process, and their goals. What’s their mission when working with their clients? Having more than one point of reference on the homebuyer industry will give you a good idea of what companies serve their clients well and what companies don’t.

I think it will become apparent very quickly which companies really care about their clients and which ones are just saying or doing anything to get you into a contract to try to manipulate you in order for them to have personal gain. Unfortunately, it’s part of the industry, but you should always look at more than one company. It will give you a point of reference on which company is the best and which one you should work with.

6. How does selling my house to Simple Sale Work?

This is what we call the 3 Simple Steps. Step 1, you get an estimate on your property. After discussing the estimate via phone we will come view the property to confirm the estimate. That’s step 2, doing a walk-through. Step 3 is making you an official offer on the property, typically same-day, possibly in person, we’ll make that offer and then move forward with a contract.

To reiterate:

1: Giving you an estimate on your property via phone and reviewing it online
2: A walk-through of the property to confirm the estimate
3: Getting an offer on your property

In some situations we would give you our estimate and then confirm our offer without a walk-through, but in most situations we would still walk through the property to confirm the offer.

7. How much work is it for me to sell you my home?

We get this question a lot. If you look at some of our reviews, you’ll see clients mention how little time they spent on the actual process because we try to make it as simple as possible. We really want you to do as little as possible, so we handle all the steps and processes that come with clearing title. Working with the title companies and conveying the title. We absolutely do not charge fees for giving you an estimate or an offer. No fees for walk-through, nothing. We do not charge fees for anything like that.

To fully answer the question, we try to make it as little work as possible. We shouldn’t have much more than a few conversations on the phone, a walk-through, and then signing a contract and a deed on close. There really shouldn’t be much more than that. If there is anything more than that, it may be because there’s legal issues, but we would handle most of those and explain what’s going on as we’re handling those problems.

8. Are there any good resources to find more information on distressed homes?

I think as a company we do have a lot of information on our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com. We have a lot of articles written that explain questions like:

• What is a distressed property?
• What does a distressed home look like?
• How to deal with tax liens?
• What are tax liens?
• How to sell your house with tax liens?
• What to do with a property with excessive repairs?
• How to sell your house as-is?

All types of articles that help explain how the process works and how to do it yourself without working with someone like Simple Sale Central Florida or another homebuyer. That’s one option. You can also search on Google for more information. For example, if you have a tax lien on your property, Googling “what people do when they have a tax lien on their property.”

One good website for really deep information is biggerpockets.com. It’s mostly real estate investors, but there are sellers learning about what’s going on with their property from investors. There are a lot of articles and opinions on certain aspects of distressed home sales. That’s a great reference but you can Google it and try to find a reputable source like our website, biggerpockets.com or an attorney’s website with blogs or information. Those three would be good references but there isn’t any one source in particular that I would recommend.

Wrapping Up

I think that is it for today for our Q&A. If there are any other questions you can put them in the comments now. I don’t see any, if there aren’t any questions that come up in the next few seconds, I’m going to go ahead and conclude here.

We are Simple Sale Central Florida, we buy distressed properties throughout Central Florida. Our main goal is to bring transparency and accountability to distressed home sales. That really means that we’re accountable for what we do, we’re very transparent about the process and we try to work with our clients to give them the best experience possible in a situation that’s very stressful. That’s our goal and that’s what we strive to do.

Give us a call any time at 407-338-4183 or you can visit our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com, and we will typically get back to you within a few minutes after you’ve filled out the form. We’d love to answer any questions you have about your property. If that is it, thank you all for viewing and we will be back next month with another Q&A. Thank you.

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

Hey, it’s Evan with Simple Sale Central Florida. We buy distressed homes throughout Central Florida, from Tampa to Orlando to Titusville.

We’re bringing you a Q&A. We typically do these every few weeks to answer any questions that we typically see from home sellers. As a distressed home buyer we see tons of questions because it’s kind of a topic that there isn’t a lot of good information about, so we like to bring you Q&As in which we openly talk about things that we see everyday.

And again, I’m Evan with Simple Sale Central Florida, and we will dive right into questions.

1. Is there anything I can do to get a higher offer on my home?

There’s always things you can do to get a higher offer. Very simple things would be just cleaning the property up. That’s going to bring a higher value, for example. If there’s a lot of junk or items like that, cleaning the outside of the property, the inside of the property, floors – replacing floors is a really easy thing that can make a big difference on the value of your property.

Other things could be updates, but that’s going to get a little more complicated, and a little more time consuming and hectic. But I would say the biggest one would really be just making it more appealing, in the sense of it’s just a cleaner property. That would be the fastest and easiest way.

If there’s a lot of junk around the property, that can be unappealing to home buyers that come and look at your property. It’s like anything else in life, if something is dirty, if there’s a lot of junk, it’s just less appealing to anyone that wants to buy it, even though it actually may not have a significant effect on on the house itself. You can make a big difference in what you’re going to be offered for your property.

2. I’m not sure if I’m ready to sell yet. Can I still talk about my options?

We have people all the time that just want to talk about thinking about it. You know, don’t know if I do want to sell or don’t want to sell. We will absolutely talk with you about your options and then make a recommendation.

Quite often we do tell people to not sell or maybe they should list their property because it’s not a good fit, they’re not actually a distressed property. Maybe there’s some very minor things wrong with the property that, in a sense, if you sell to someone that’s an investor or cash buyer, you’re going to get sell it for a significant discount and you’re really not going to get the most money out of it.

With that being said, yes you can absolutely call and we can talk through all your options and then make up a recommendation on what we think is your best option.

So yeah, feel free to call, 407-338-4183 is our number. You can go to our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com, and you can leave your information and we can give you a call. But with that being said, absolutely. We don’t charge to give advice on what we think is your best option because it’s not always us. We’re not always your best option.

In a lot of situations your best option may be not doing anything at all. You may be considering selling your distressed home and then it ends up that it’s probably not your best option and may be a better option just to keep it and rent it or, also list the property. Absolutely give us a call anytime and we will talk about your options.

3. Will I have to pay any fees for working with a distressed home buyer?

No, working with a distressed home buyer you typically do not pay any fees. Let’s say someone offers you $200,000 for your house. That’s typically what you’re going to get minus pro-rated property taxes you’re probably going to get around $200,000 minus whatever property taxes you may owe. Otherwise, if you’re being charged closing costs or anything of that nature, that’s very uncommon.

If an investor or cash buyer or home buyer is buying your property and they’re trying to charge you fees, that’s not typical and I would question the validity of that. You may be working with an unreputable company if they’re trying to add fees that you don’t understand because it’s very uncommon.

Like I was saying, typically what you get offered is what you’re going to get. If that’s not the case in your situation, then I would question that company and figure out “What are these fees that you are charging me? It doesn’t make sense. Why am I paying closing costs? Aren’t you supposed to be paying closing costs?” Those are the types of questions I would be asking.

4. Do you require any sort of contracts to work with you?

This kind of refers back to the question that we talked about earlier. As far as talking about your options, you don’t have to sign any sort of contracts. That advice is free, no obligation, just trying to give you value in a situation where your property may be distressed. We’ll give out information to try to help you and get the best result possible for you.

As far as working in the sense of purchasing your distressed home, yes, you’ll have to sign a contract. We’ll enter into a contract period. Typically, how a contract works is we’ll sign a contract and there will be anywhere from a 3-day to 14-day inspection period on the property, and during that inspection period we will evaluate the property and work to see if it is a good fit, and then close on the property after the inspection period, typically in less than 30 days.

So yes, you have to sign a contract in the sense to sell your home but as far as just talking about your options you do not have to sign a contract with us. You do have to sign a contract in order to sell your property.

5. Can I choose my closing date?

Yes, you can absolutely choose your closing date. We are very flexible on when you can close on your property. Typically it is going to be in less than 30 days. That seems to always be the case. People want to close relatively quickly and we work with the seller to choose a date that works with them.

You can be flexible, Monday through Friday. I would say in a lot of cases we close on Fridays but any time Monday through Friday in a period, any time of month is fine. So, yes you can actually choose your closing date.

There is another question that references this, but you can actually stay in your property anywhere from a couple days to a couple of weeks after closing to move your stuff out of the property. We typically allow anywhere from 2 to 14 days to give you time after closing to move out of the property.

You can have a closing and then remain in the property for a short period of time. All of that would be contractual, to make sure that you’re going to be vacating the property at some point after close, but there is a move out period available. People use it on occasion, it’s not used as often, but it does happen in certain situations and we are flexible working with you for that.

6. Do you buy homes outside of Central Florida?

We do consider them, and we look at them actually quite often. I would say that most of the properties are in Central Florida, but we would absolutely look at your property outside of Central Florida. Anywhere in the U.S. for that matter. We’ve done deals in several different states, it really just depends on the property, but we are definitely open to looking at your property anywhere but our focus right now is currently distressed homes in Central Florida.

7. Will I have to do any major cleaning or repairs before I move out?

No, you don’t; you really don’t. You really don’t have to clean the property or make any repairs. We’ve bought properties that have significant issues and tons of problems and it doesn’t really make a difference but referencing one of the questions earlier, cleaning or making those small repairs to your house is going to get you a higher value, without a doubt.

Taking the time to throw away junk or making small repairs like minor bathroom updates and things of that nature is going to make a difference. But do you have to do those things? No. You absolutely do not have to do those things.

We purchase distressed properties as-is with junk or excessive repairs, leaks, roof issues, electrical issues, anything of that nature we will definitely close on the property with no problem, so it really isn’t an issue.

8. What kind of legal issues do you deal with on homes you buy?

The typical legal issues would be probate. Probate is where the owner of the property has died and you are needing to go through the courts to determine that the property is now yours. This process can last anywhere from 3-6 months going through the courts. Other legal issues would be liens, judgments, things of that nature. Depending on the liens or judgments it can be a very short process or it could be a very long one.

We are currently dealing with one with code violations in Tampa that has taken several months, but you know, that’s what we do and we can always work through the issues, those legal issues, but honestly the most common is a probate. That’s what you see most, because it’s something that people don’t really talk about, but it’s also actually very common. Those are the types of things that we deal with.

9. Do you list properties on the market?

We do now list properties on the market. We didn’t up until a few months ago, but now we are currently listing properties. If someone brings us a property and we know without a doubt that our cash offer isn’t going to be competitive compared to what maybe a retail buyer would pay for the property, we do offer listing service in order to allow the client to get as much money as they can for the property.

At the end of the day our goal is to work in the interests of the client, and to do that in some scenarios listing the property makes more sense and they get more money for it and really, that’s our goal, is for someone to take a distressed property and get the most they can out of it and move on with their life. If that means listing the property and selling it to someone else we will absolutely do that. We will make that recommendation.

So yeah, Simple Sale Realty is now listing properties. I would say it’s not our first option. We would always rather buy the property, but in some situations if it doesn’t make sense for the client, we’re not going to recommend we buy the property if it isn’t the best choice for you.

10. What can I do if my property is worth less than my mortgage?

This is what would be called a short sale. You would negotiate with the bank on making an offer that’s less than the mortgage. Let’s say, for example, your house is worth $200,000 and you have a mortgage for $250,000, you would go to your bank and you would say “I have someone wanting to buy my property,” and we would help you with these negotiations as well, “I have someone wanting to buy my property for $200,000. I know I owe $250,000, is that adequate?”

You’ll have to get it approved by the bank on the short sale, and when you do get approved then you can sell the property for that amount, whatever that determined amount is. You can absolutely negotiate with the bank on your mortgage. It’s done more often than you would think and it’s really not an uncommon occurrence – it really isn’t. It’s done quite a bit and it’s a useful strategy for people in situations where for whatever reason. Maybe they bought they bought their property for a price that was too high and now they need to sell.

You can absolutely negotiate with the banks on your property, and get out of your distressed property situation. That is something that we always consider. With the short sale process it can take several months if not a year, so keep that in mind. It isn’t a short process in all scenarios it’s going to take 6 months or more. It’s totally possible you can sell the property that way, it’s just going to take some time.

I think that’s it for today. Are there any questions out there? I know I see a couple of people on here. If you have any questions at all feel free to ask, and also we’re always here to answer your questions. You can message us on Facebook, that’s a really easy way and you can catch us at simplesalecentralflorida.com.

You can send us your property’s address and your information and we will reach out to you and talk with you about your property, discuss what issues you’re having, and see if we’re a good fit for one another. If not, then that’s really not a problem. The goal of the company is to help the client out of their distressed home situation. If that means not working with us that is absolutely fine. We’re here to provide a service and that’s really the core of the company. If we’re not a good fit we’ll find a good fit for you, and it doesn’t always have to be us.

I guess if there aren’t any questions – I don’t see any questions, then that’s it. Like I said in the beginning, we purchase distressed properties throughout Central Florida from Tampa to Orlando, Titusville, Melbourne. Really from coast-to-coast in the Central Florida area we are actively buying properties.

If you have a distressed home that you are looking to sell or if you just have questions about distressed properties, give us a call at 407-338-4183. We also have an ebook on the site that you can download and there’s some good information in that. It’s a short, simple ebook that will tell you about distressed properties and help you with your distressed home situation.

But if that’s it then we will catch you next time. Feel free to reach out anytime. Thank you.

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

Hey this is Evan Shelley with Simple Sale Central Florida. We’re back for an August Q&A. The last few months we’ve been doing Q&As for commonly asked questions from clients that we work with.

We are a distressed home buyer throughout Central Florida. We buy properties in Orlando, Tampa, St Pete, Temple Terrace, New Port Richey, Ocala, Webster, Titusville, Melbourne, and we’ve bought properties in Palm Coast as well. So really all of Central Florida.

We’re just going to run through a few questions that we see with clients. Here we go.

1. Can I sell my house with code violations on the property?
So this one is kind of nuanced, where you can sell a property with code violations and we’ve bought properties with code violations. It’s common, though, that the buyer of the property is not going to want those code violations and will probably not buy it.

We’re different in the aspect that we do, depending on what the violations are, and there’s a difference between code violations and code violation liens and the type of code violation. If the code violation was for something simple, like an overgrown yard, that’s not a huge deal. You would just cut the grass down to a reasonable length, then Code Enforcement would remove the code violation, bringing you into compliance.

If you have code violations that have been a problem for a long period of time, you’ll have what’s called a code violation lien on the property. Typically those code violation liens will stack up at a couple of hundred dollars a day and if you have that lien for long enough and you don’t bring it into compliance it can run into tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An example of this, we bought a property in Tampa, Florida and it had 2 code violation liens at the time that we bought it. Those liens had been on the property for several years. So at $200 a day over several years it ended up being several hundred thousand dollars in code violations. So what we are actually in the process of doing – we brought the property into compliance. The place looks completely different. It was a very distressed property with many, many issues. After we brought the property into compliance by cleaning it up, we’re now talking with Hillsborough County about settling the code violation liens.

So with that being said, it really just depends upon your buyer, but you can absolutely sell it that way, but most buyers will not buy a property with code violation liens, but we absolutely do. We would probably buy a house with most any situation, but we would just have to evaluate the situation on the property before we made a final decision.

2. I found out my house has a tax lien against it while trying to sell. What can I do?
So this just depends on what type of lien. You have property tax liens, IRS tax liens. In the instance of a property tax lien, depending upon how much property taxes are – typically I’ve seen them everywhere from $1,000 to maybe $10,000.

If you’re selling the house, what typically will happen is the title company will take that $10,000 out of the proceeds. So let’s say you sell the house for $100,000. $10,000 of that will go to the municipality that is owed the $10,000 and the title company will send it to them. You can also pay it yourself outside of the sale, but typically your proceeds would just be reduced from the sale of the property by the amount that’s owed and that would take care of the tax lien.

So typically, it wouldn’t hold up a sale, but you would have to get that lien removed from the property before you can close. Typically a title company has handled those situations before so it’s not an issue where you can close and pay them at the same time the same day. It really just depends upon your situation but in most scenarios you can still sell.

3. My home was affected by a sinkhole, and it has not been repaired. Can I sell it?
Yes, you can definitely sell it. There are niche buyers that buy sinkholes. There aren’t a ton of people that buy them but there are definitely some, Simple Sale included. We will work with you if you have a property that has a sinkhole and it has not been repaired.

Those costs for repairs can be pretty high, but you never really know until you get the situation evaluated and then once you start the repairs, you’ll see how deep the sinkhole actually is and how much work and material is actually going to be used to stabilize that sinkhole.

So yes, you can definitely sell it. For the buyer it is a risky scenario. Typically with a sinkhole, that property is going to be sold at a steep discount because you could end up in a situation with a property that may never be able to be sold again to anyone because it may be condemned permanently.

In that scenario you can’t have tenants in the property and you can’t resell it to a retail buyer. There’s a lot of risk associated with selling and buying a property that has a sinkhole that hasn’t been repaired. But it’s totally possible and there are investors out there that will take that risk.

4. Are there any benefits to making repairs before I reach out to a home buyer?
I get this question all the time and it really does just depend. I feel like I’ve said that several times, but it really does just depend on what’s going on with your property.

There are some repairs that aren’t going to make much of a difference where you might think it would. You can take the time to go get, for example, you can go get… Let’s say you change the floors in the bedrooms because the carpet was a little worn. Is that going to increase the value of the property by more than what you paid for the carpet? Probably not.

It’s probably not going to be a significant difference to where you felt like the time you took to find a contractor and get the work done and move the room around is worth it for you. I just made that scenario up on the fly but some repairs don’t make much sense.

Now, if you’re going to go and completely update the house – absolutely, yeah. You could totally do that, and that’s going to be a huge value add based on the amount of money you’re going to spend compared to what the property is going to be worth afterward. It’s a great deal, but it’s a lot of work, and there’s a lot of risk of getting a bad contractor and things of that nature. It really depends on if you are a contractor or if you have any experience in remodeling and repairs.

In the situations where those big remodels would help the value of the house, it can become risky if you aren’t educated on handling contractors and working with contractors, making sure that they don’t overcharge you and making sure that the job is done right. If you’re just looking to get rid of the property, a lot of times it doesn’t make sense to make those repairs. If the repairs are significant, or if it’s a full update of the property.

If the property is in good shape and it hasn’t been updated, you’re typically still going to get more than you would think for the property even though it hasn’t been updated. As long as there aren’t significant issues and the property is fully functional, you are going to get more than you actually think.

It really would depend, I would say, in most scenarios it’s better for peace of mind just to go ahead and sell the property without taking several extra months and headaches to repair the property, because that’s not what you do. That’s what we do every day. We buy and sell properties, we fix up properties. It’s what we do, but for most people that may not be the best option.

5. I can’t afford the cost of a probate, but I need to sell my home. What can I do?
We have scenarios all the time, where someone needs a probate on a property and they can’t afford it, they can’t pay the lawyer for it, and they want to sell just to get rid of the property. A lot of times those people don’t even know they need a probate, so what we do in that scenario is just pay the lawyer fees. We take the risk of the probate, because probates aren’t always going to be smooth.

You can have errors, have disputes and probates can get ran out for months, if not years. You can find homebuyers that will pay for that probate. I know Simple Sale Central Florida does. I’m sure other homebuyers do as well, and that they’ll help you through the process, because we handle probates all the time. We’ve seen a lot of different scenarios and our lawyers have seen a lot of different scenarios so I’m sure that we can take care of you.

6. My house could use a lot of upgrades, but I don’t want to deal with it all. Will I lose a lot if I sell it as-is?
I think that’s pretty similar to the other question. Well, I actually ended up answering that question on the last one. It’s not the same, but if it has a lot of upgrades and you don’t want to deal with it. Like I was saying, you won’t lose as much as you would think selling it as-is as long as the property is functional.

Because in a lot of scenarios that house will become a rental property if it’s fully functional. That’s probably the highest and best use for it that can bring a higher value for the property. If it’s just remodel upgrades then you won’t. If it’s a property where there’s tons of issues where, for example, we were talking about the kitchen. If the sink doesn’t work and the dishwasher doesn’t work, none of the appliances work, the cabinets are on hinges that don’t work, then making that upgrade would be a significant help to the value of your property. It’s just a lot of work and a lot of headache. If all the appliances work fine, the sink works fine, the dishwasher works fine, the cabinets are fine – it’s just dated, then you’re probably not going to lose as much as you think you would and the property still does have value as is.

7. What’s up with those “we buy homes for cash” signs on the side of the road?
So those signs are typically people – it’s just a form of marketing – and those people will buy houses or they’ll have investors. They’re just using that form of marketing because a lot of people will, in the right locations, pass by those signs just like billboards. I don’t really see any significant issue with it.

The only problem I would say with working with those people, is possibly credibility. A lot of times those people aren’t established, those companies aren’t established. They’re possibly new to the business, or may be a little shady with their tactics of working with sellers. That’s not speaking for every one of them, but for some of them that will be the case.

If it’s a reputable company, they’ll probably be trying to market to you on different avenues like Facebook for example, Google, billboards, where you’re representing a brand with accountability and trustworthiness and good reviews. It’s going to be hard to get reviews from a sign on the side of the road. So I would just be cautious. It doesn’t mean all of them are that way, but it does definitely mean that there’s a possibility of working with someone who doesn’t operate in the correct manner and look out for the interests of the client like they should.

8. How can I get the most value out of my distressed property?
That’s a good question. I would think, I mean, some of the things you can do that are the easiest is – let’s say for example, that the house has a lot of items in it. Inside, outside, everywhere. You could probably pay someone a thousand, couple thousand dollars to come in and clean out the entire property and just have no items, the house is empty and it’s not a mess. That could bring a pretty quick value add. You may put a thousand in and it may get 5 or 10 more out of it just because it just looks more appealing.

It’s not a significant difference in the property, but a lot of times people that have properties in that situation, like landlords – they’re just over it. They’re just ready to sell, they just want to be done with it and I can totally understand that. You know, it’s like anything else in life that you’ve had. If you’ve had something for a long time and you’ve had bad experiences with it, you just want to get rid of it.

But that would be one easy way, just anything cosmetic. If you have holes in the wall and you know how to repair drywall that would be a pretty quick way to make the property more appealing. You can even do little things like changing out doors. The front door could make a significant difference if it’s very, very old and has issues. Cosmetic stuff can go a long way with a distressed property, where for the buyer it’s a lot more appealing.

Now when you start getting into, like we were talking about, trying to do full home upgrades, unless you’re very experienced in it you’re going to have a lot of headaches with contractors, and it’s going to take a lot of time. I would just say cosmetic stuff would be the easiest way where the property is more appealing to the buyer.

With a distressed property, say with legal issues, it’s clearing up those legal issues as much as you can without a lawyer. If it’s a family dispute, you should try to work that out with your family before doing a deal with a home buyer. If you have a situation essentially figured out at that point, the property is going to bring a lot more money because it’s going to be a lot less headache for a home buyer. It’s going to be a lot more appealing to them.

9. If I’m interested in selling, what’s the easiest way to get an offer?
I would say there are several different avenues for selling, at this point. It really just depends on the condition of your property. Let’s say your property is in solid condition, has no issues – no legal issues that you know of, anything of that nature.

Typically, an iBuyer is going to be your best bet. An iBuyer would be something like OpenDoor or OfferPad. They can pay premiums for properties that a lot of buyers cannot and typically from what I’ve seen those offers are higher than you can get anywhere else.

I will say, though, we recently had a property in Bradenton in which we actually offered more than OfferPad did, which was unusual for us, we typically would not. I’m not sure what happened in that scenario, but typically they will offer significantly more than we can. So for most people, that is going to be the best bet if the property is not distressed.

For people that are trying to sell a distressed property, we’re – you could term it – a distressed iBuyer, where we really only buy distressed properties with significant legal issues, significant repairs. There has to be issues with the property for us to have interest, because we’re in the business of buying those distressed properties and taking care of the situations and then re-selling the property rather than just quickly buying a good looking property for a little less and then reselling it. That’s not really our model that we work with.

So it really depends on your situation. I mean, if it’s a distressed property, then we could definitely get you an offer. Another, are other companies that make offers on distressed properties. In some scenarios we’re the only company making offers because the property is so distressed, has so many legal issues. We have a property right now that we’ve been working litigation on for 8 months, and that property – we still haven’t gotten all the legal issues fixed yet.

But that’s what we do, and those are the properties that we buy. There, I would just search online – there’s Simple Sale Central Florida and there’s a couple other legitimate buyers in Central Florida and then, of course, Zillow, OpenDoor and OfferPad if your property is not distressed.

10. Will you buy my home even if it’s not distressed?
So that, I tied that one back into the last question. We typically do not. We’re just not competitive, it’s not our model. I mean, we’ll make an offer and we’ll make a credible offer where we’re not going to change the offer price on you or anything of that nature, but, as far as buying it just to buy it we really probably aren’t your best option. If it’s not distressed at all and you’re not wanting to just get a quick cash offer, then I would highly recommend you list the property with someone that you know and trust.

We do have a brokerage now, Simple Sale Realty, that will list your property. We can list that property for you if it’s not distressed, but I highly recommend working with someone that you know and trust. That would be that would be your best bet for a good experience. We have highly qualified realtors at Simple Sale Realty that I’m sure we can help you out with that listing.

11. Are there any fees associated with selling the property?
This is probably the second most common question I get. So there really are not any fees. If the property offer is $150,000, that is the amount that you will receive, minus if you owe any property taxes. If you don’t owe any property taxes it will be $150,000, flat.

In scenarios where there’s liens, you’d subtract the liens, but as far as just outright fees, there aren’t any. We pay all closing costs for the property, so you don’t have to worry about it. So, to fully answer the question: No, there aren’t any fees, it would just be items that are owed by the seller – the owner that’s selling the property, like property taxes. If there’s code violations, you’d have to pay those, but aside from that, there won’t be any fees associated.

I know other models — I believe the iBuyers – they have an offer and then they subtract fees from it. Those fees are all laid out, but there are fees associated with those closings that you have to pay attention to.

12. How long can I stay in my property after closing?
This is a really common one too. Typically we will allow, like, 14 days after closing. We’ve done more, but typically if it’s more than 14 days you’ll essentially rent it back for a month for market rent price in order for you to get yourself situated into another property. So that’s not an issue. But 14 days or less, typically you can just stay on the property and there’s no issues. So, yeah I think that fully answers it.

Wrapping Up

That was all of our questions. If there’s any other questions you can type them in the comments now. I haven’t seen any comments, so I think that will wrap it up for today, and I’m sure we will be back next month in September for another Q&A.

And, as always, if you are looking to get an offer on your distressed property you can go to simplesalecentralflorida.com. We’re rapidly growing throughout Central Florida like I was saying, buying properties in Bradenton, Sarasota, Tampa, St. Pete, New Port Richey, Temple Terrace, Orlando, Ocala, Kissimmee. I’m just trying to think of all the places. And then on the east coast as I mentioned earlier, Titusville, Melbourne, Palm Coast, Daytona.

So we’re looking everywhere, and we’re actively buying everywhere, even with everything going on in the economy, we are trying to purchase properties and keep moving. So if you have a distressed property you’re looking to sell, feel free to come to the site – simplesalecentralflorida.com.

You can check us out on Facebook, you can check us out on our Google reviews, and if you are looking to sell your distressed home, I would highly recommend working with someone with great reviews and a lot of credibility. You can typically tell that pretty quickly after looking at their social medias and their reviews; it will give you a good idea of the company that you’re working with.

OK, I think that’s it. I will catch up with you all next month. Thanks. Bye.

We handle distressed homes in Central Florida all the time. We know how difficult and overwhelming a distressed home situation can be, and over the years we’ve become experts at tackling some of the most difficult situations, including probate cases, squatters, hoarding cases, and more.

Regardless of your situation, we understand how out of control it can feel. Rather than losing your home or sleep over a seemingly impossible situation, we encourage you to reach out to our team to discuss your situation. There’s no cost to call us, and if your home is a good fit, we may extend an offer to you on your home. Learn more about how our process works here.

In this video, Evan recounts his experience working with a homeowner just a few months ago. This distressed home in Titusville was a difficult case, but very similar to many others we work with on a regular basis. The homeowner called about his property that he’d inherited from his father when he passed away. His brother had been living at the property and unfortunately passed away while at home.

He had been speaking with a lawyer who was charging him $200 an hour, and even though he figured he would need a probate case, he could not afford to continue speaking with the lawyer. He didn’t fully understand probate, so Evan took time to explain the process to help him get a better grasp on the situation.

His sister had worked with a realtor who appraised the home far more than Evan figured it was worth after inspecting the property. The homeowner had been negotiating with home buyers using this appraisal, and many home buyers agreed to it before they had seen the property. This happens often, as home buyers will tell the homeowner what they want to hear and renegotiate after they get the home under contract contingent on the inspection.

We do not condone these predatory practices at Meli, as they force homeowners into a situation where they are tied up in legal issues with the home buyer, who is now offering them far less than they initially offered. Depending on the situation, this can leave the home owner with no choice but to accept this offer – it’s a shady practice.

Meli will only offer you a contract once we have inspected the property to give you your final price. Once the contract is signed, you will receive the amount agreed upon – no hidden fees or closing costs.

Once Evan went to the home to inspect the property, he realized that the homeowner’s brother had passed away in the home, and his body was not found for a few weeks. Because of this, he wasn’t able to enter parts of the property for fear of breathing in toxins.

After inspecting the home, Evan came to the conclusion that there were several issues facing the property: they possibly needed to get a probate on the property in order to close, the property needed to be professionally cleaned to remove the biohazard, and it was a hoarder case with junk from one side of the property to the other.

Evan told the homeowner he would receive an offer the next day, but let him know it wouldn’t be nearly as high as the offers he had been receiving and explained why. Evan and a partner made a no-contingency offer to buy the property as-is.

As stated, he didn’t offer nearly as much as the competition, but Evan listened to the homeowner and was able to buy the home, allowing him to move on with his life. Evan worked with his lawyer to clear up the probate and worked with a local biohazard cleaning company, BioAway to clean up the property.

We work with distressed homeowners in Central Florida, and our mission is to get them out of a stressful, difficult housing situation as simply as possible.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you’re also facing a distressed housing situation. There’s no cost to talk with a member of our team, and we’ll help you find the right solution, even if it isn’t us.

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

Hey, this is Evan with Simple Sale Central Florida. Wanted to do a Q&A. We’re trying to do these every few weeks now to just answer some questions that we’ve seen, questions that were asked by clients that we work with. We have 10 or so questions. We’re just going to run through them and then at the end if there are any more questions feel free to type them into the chat. Here we go!

1. How do I know if my home is distressed?

Distressed doesn’t just mean that you’re in foreclosure. It can mean that you have excessive repairs on the property that maybe has excessive code violations that you owe on. It could be excessive repairs. There’s many different instances. It could even be that you just need to sell your house as soon as possible.

Typically those are the types of situations that we work with and if you are not really in one of those types of situations Simple Sale Central Florida may not be a good fit. More of a traditional route with a realtor – which we also do that as well – it’s just a different avenue for selling your home.

2. Can I sell my home if there is a judgment on it?

So… yes and no. You can definitely enter into the selling process. You can sign a contract, but when that judgment shows up on title, you’ll have to take care of that judgment, whatever it may be. If it’s a judgment for you owing money on a fine or something, that matter will have to be paid at closing or before closing in order to be able to close on the property.

So if the judgment isn’t taken care of, typically you aren’t going to be able to close on the property. You’re going to have to sell it subject to the judgment. In almost all scenarios we will not buy a property like that, but we will help you take care of the judgment before the close and make sure that the close goes smoothly.

3. I don’t know if I own the title to my home. Can I still sell it?

So in those types of situations, which we come across often, what we would do is enter into a contract on the property and then run a title search. In that title search, which comes back in a day or two, it will tell us if you actually own the home or if someone else owns the home that you don’t know, or maybe a family member that you don’t actually know of.

Even in those situations – we just closed on a property last week where the lady that was selling the property had multiple other people on title and she had no idea. But we still took care of it and found the solution and everyone walked away happy.

So yes, you can still sell it as long as we solve whatever title issues there may be on the property. So I wouldn’t let possible title issues keep you from entering into the selling process. I would continue to move forward and then address any issues that come up.

4. My sister and I both inherited our parent’s home. I want to sell it but she doesn’t. What can I do?

So currently there’s a property that we’re working on in which there are 7 people that own a home, and a couple of them don’t want to sell it. So there’s always a way to get the property sold, but you really want everyone to be on the same page.

If you have no choice and you need to sell your part of the inherited home as soon as possible there’s options like partition sales, which means you would go to a judge and say “I own one-half, she owns one-half she doesn’t want to sell but I do. She’s not talking with me about it. She won’t buy my half out. I want to move forward with the sale.”

It’s a very long process, probably at least 6 months. If the judge approves it, you’ll move forward on the sale of the property. But I would highly recommend not going that route. There’s always a solution for everybody.

If there are differences or whatever, it may be something you can figure out. Those differences come up in most every scenario that we’ve seen. You know, there’s always a solution if there’s some kind of relationship problem. There’s always a way to work out those problems and move forward where you don’t really need to get into litigation.

5. I inherited a home from a hoarder and don’t even know where to start.

So, depending upon the situation, you need to decide how involved you want to get with the property. If it’s not an emotional event for you, I would highly suggest just selling the hoarder’s property to a distressed home buyer. But if it is an emotional event however, if it’s just you or if it’s various people and you want to actually go through some of the stuff like valuables, and definitely if it was someone very close to you, I wouldn’t recommend just selling it immediately because you’re probably going to have seller’s remorse since there are a lot of emotions involved, especially if it’s a parent.

If the previous owner has no ties to you, I honestly would just sell it to a distressed home buyer that’s experienced in things like that and try not to worry about it too much. It really just depends upon whatever your situation may be is how I would really approach it.

6. Can I do anything if my home is going to be foreclosed on in the next two weeks?

You can absolutely sell your home facing foreclosure. So in those types of situations if, for example, you approach Simple Sale Central Florida and said “I’m foreclosing in a couple weeks,” what we would do is get a contract and we would end up filing that with a judge, saying that the property is being sold. That would hold off the sale until the closing of the property.

A lot of people don’t know that, that you can usually do that up until just a couple days before if you can get it filed and show that you’re selling it. The judge will typically push back that foreclosure auction and you can close on the property and then you don’t have to worry about it.

There’s also other options. You can file for bankruptcy. I’ve seen that a lot, where someone doesn’t want to get rid of the house, they need to but they really don’t want to and they can file. Filing for bankruptcy will put off the foreclosure as well. It really depends upon your situation, but there are multiple options that you can choose that will keep off the foreclosure.

I would not suggest doing something just to delay the inevitable. I’ve seen people file for bankruptcy and not actually go into bankruptcy, and then you have a judge that isn’t very happy with you because you didn’t perform on what you said you were going to. So yes, absolutely you can sell it which would hold off foreclosure and you wouldn’t lose it at auction, or you can file for bankruptcy there may be even other options but nothing else that I’m aware of.

7. There was some unpermitted work done on our house, can we still sell it?

You can absolutely sell it. Typically it is going to be difficult to get a mortgage on a property with unpermitted work, so it depends upon how obvious the unpermitted work is. Something very minor, probably no one is going to notice, but if it’s a whole addition to a house there’s a good chance that you’re not going to be able to get a mortgage on it. Then you would typically have to sell it to a cash home buyer, someone who’s going to pay cash for the property and take on the risk of that unpermitted work and then take out a permit and then getting the work approved.

But you can absolutely still sell it. A lot of people don’t know that you can take a property where the county or the city may not know that half the property exists and sell it to someone for cash and then let them deal with it. We’ve dealt with situations like that.

8. What if there are tenants in the house? Can I still sell it?

So, over the last month or so maybe a couple of months we’ve had some situations where we bought properties that do have tenants in them or squatters. People that may have never paid rent to begin with and in those types of situations you can absolutely still sell them. You really don’t have to do anything with the tenants just let the buyer figure out the situation with them.

I had a situation in Tampa a couple of months ago. The property had, at the time of closing, 6 squatters in the house and they were not tenants. They were kind of hanging out with the previous tenant, the previous tenant moved out and they just decided to stay. The seller just wanted to get out of the situation because they were taking advantage of her, so we bought the property and we worked with the squatters and everyone walked away without any litigation. So you can absolutely sell the property and let the buyer deal with it.

9. Do you buy mobile homes?

That’s a very common question. We do not just buy mobile homes, we only buy mobile homes if there’s deeded land attached. So that means you own the land under the mobile home If you don’t own the land under the mobile home we really are not interested in buying those there’s probably someone out there that would but it’s not what our company does.

So if you have a mobile home that’s distressed and it does have land under it we are interested in looking at it. But as far as just the mobile home where we’d have to haul the mobile home off the lot or pay the lot fee we’re not really interested in taking that on.

10. Do you buy land with code violations or liens?

Yes we do. We’ve had situations where we’ve worked with people to tried to take care of code violations and liens on empty lots where there were significant liens and code violations. There were so many that we couldn’t actually get it figured out before the sale. I think they actually sold. But we absolutely do.

Land is a similar asset to a home. It does have value and you can sell it to someone. Typically it is going to be someone that will buy for cash that wants to then build on it but we will absolutely work with you on empty lots or even acreages of land with code violations or liens.

11. Will you work with me if I already have a Realtor?

Quite often when someone has a realtor, they will end up reaching out and wanting to discuss their property. I may find out in the process that they have a realtor that they’re obligated to pay commission to.

So we will, but if you already have a realtor, more than likely you’re not in a distressed property situation. In those situations if you are looking for someone to buy your house and you have a Realtor – that’s their job, they should be reaching out because they’re earning their commission. I would seriously consider finding another Realtor, but we will absolutely work with them. Without a doubt we have worked with people who have Realtors in the past and had good experiences so that’s definitely not a deterrent at all on our end.

Wrapping Up

So I think that was 11 or 12 questions there. Really want to see if anybody on stream has any questions at all. I don’t think I see any but if you do now’s the time.

If not, I think that kind of concludes our Q&A and, like I said, we’re now doing this every few weeks so we’ll be back in a few weeks with some more interesting questions. We’ll try to mix it up a little bit more next time.

I meant to say we’re available through Facebook, through LinkedIn, through our website, of course – simplesalecentralflorida.com. So we’re always available to talk about any distressed home issues you have, or if you have a family member. If you are a Realtor we now have a place for you to submit clients.

So there’s plenty of ways to reach out to us. Like I said Facebook, LinkedIn and the website in which, you know, if you have questions. feel free to ask. I would say a decent percentage of people that come to us are not looking to sell, they’re just looking to have a discussion to see if they want to sell or need to sell and we’re absolutely happy to answer those questions for you.

So, I think that’s it. Appreciate you all for coming on and, like I said, if you have any questions feel free to reach out on simplesalecentralflorida.com. Thank you!

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

This is Evan with Simple Sale. Just want to do a quick introduction before we get in the Q&A. Simple Sale is a distressed home buyer throughout Central Florida.

We’re actively buying distressed properties throughout Central Florida, anywhere from Tampa to St. Pete, Titusville, Orlando, Ocala, Kissimmee, several different locations throughout Central Florida.

Distressed properties are anything from code violations, liens, legal issues like probate, judgments, we actively purchase those types of properties.

We typically do not purchase properties that are not distressed. We do not make competitive offers on those types of properties, but we do actively work to purchase distressed properties and fix those situations on those properties. And with that we’ll go ahead and get into the commonly asked questions that we get here at Simple Sale.

1. Can my house be distressed even if it’s not damaged?

Commonly people think distressed either means the roof is falling in, the A/C doesn’t work, the windows are knocked out >or it needs tons of repairs, and that’s not always the case. Distressed can mean foreclosure, code violations, liens, judgments, It can mean that there are probate issues where there’s going to have to be litigation or lawyer work of any kind done. That’s what is considered distressed in the residential space.

The repairs aspect of distressed is commonly what we see. A lot of times a property that’s distressed has a lot of work up front that needs to be done. That’s not a reason to not sell your property, just because it needs repairs and it appears distressed. There are companies out there like Simple Sale that will purchase your home and get you the money you deserve.

2. How are you able to work through legal issues if you aren’t a lawyer?

This is pretty common. People that call Simple Sale and ask us “How do I fix this legal issue? I have a probate? How do I get rid of these judgments or liens because I can’t sell my property?” From our experience we are able to talk with you about a lot of situations.

We don’t give advice because we aren’t lawyers, but we do have lawyers that we use for different types of situations like probate, for example. That’s a very common one. I would say a third of all properties that we buy are probate properties that people don’t even know about.

We’ll run title on the property and figure out that the person who thinks they own the property doesn’t actually own it outright, technically. They may have treated it like they owned it for the last 10 years and have lived in it,  but that issue needs to be resolved in court, and we always hire a lawyer to do that after we figure out that there’s an issue that needs to be resolved. A lot of times just talking we can figure out a solution without ever having to hire a lawyer. It may not actually be a legal issue, even though it may have seemed that way.

A quick example is a property right now that we are trying to purchase in St. Petersburg. I’ve been talking with this guy for a couple of weeks now, we have a property under contract and we’re looking to purchase it. We ran title on it and it came back that he actually didn’t have 100% interest in the property and he didn’t know that. And it’s very common, and now we’re going to have to do probate on the property in order for us to purchase the property.

So it’s not an unusual circumstance to get into a situation where you need a lawyer and you don’t even know it.

3. Can you tell me how much my home is worth?

When people reach out, a lot of times they ask how much is their home worth and the easiest way to figure that out is to go to our website, simplesalecentralflorida.com. Type in your address, leave the contact info that’s the best way to reach you, and we will get in touch with you. We’ll ask a few questions to determine the current status of your property legally and from a physical standpoint and from there we can give you an estimate on what we think the property is worth, contingent on legal issues that we may not know about, of course.

That’s kind of the start of the relationship with Simple Sale where we’ll give you an estimate and if that estimate is something that you are interested in, we’ll dig further into coming to view the property, getting to know you, getting to know your situation, and talking with you about what’s going on with the property. A lot of times there can be some emotions, complexities, and we actively work to make sure that you’re happy with the experience.

4. Why should I sell my home to you and not through a realtor?

That’s a great question, and that happens all the time. A lot of times we are not the best fit for buying your property because it isn’t distressed. If there isn’t anything wrong with the property you should list it with a Realtor.

If that’s the better decision for you, we will tell you. We are not in the business >of giving you bad advice. We’re in the business of finding a solution for you, and sometimes that solution is us and other times it’s not. It’s all about having that initial conversation and determining what your situation is and what appears to be your best direction forward.

5. My home is a wreck, I’m not sure if it’s even worth selling.

Commonly the properties that we look at do have issues with them where there’s a lot of junk or a bad roof, knocked out windows, major leaks and I would say that in almost of those types of situations it’s a non-issue. Very few properties that we come by are properties that we can’t do something with.

If you’re embarrassed by the condition of your property, I would say that’s not a reason to not reach out to us. You should reach out to us, because I’ve never had a property where it’s in such a condition that I can’t evaluate it and give you a reasonable offer. I would highly recommend that you still reach out because it’s not something that’s going to deter us.

In most initial conversations with sellers, they’ll ask: “Is this the worst house you’ve ever seen?” A large percentage of people ask that and there’s a few that stand off on their own, but then everyone else is pretty much the same. There may be some junk or some issues where repairs or updates are needed or there’s trash in the yard, but that’s a non-issue and it won’t affect you getting an offer on your property.

6. Can I sell my home if it’s in pre-foreclosure?

That’s a really common question, and of course you can. People sometimes don’t understand that almost all these transactions are going to be done through someone that’s paying cash for the property. You’re not going to be able to go out and find someone who’s then going to buy the home through retail and get a loan to purchase the property. That’s not typically how it works.

In pre-foreclosure, someone has to come in and pay cash for it. The offer is not going to be what your friend down the street told you that he’d pay you for it, that he just needed to get a loan from the bank, because that’s in the form of a loan and we buy in the forms of cash. The valuations for property are different based on cost.

So to answer that question again you can absolutely sell it. It’s a non-issue. In those types of situations what we do is we run title. Assuming title is clear we get a payoff from your bank, and then we get that number and my title company will then wire the money upon close to the bank to pay off the loan, and then you’ll get what’s left in between.

For example, if you owed $100,000 on it and you’re in foreclosure and we have the payoff for $100,000 even and I offered you $140,000, you would get $40,000 in between, minus some small pro-rated tax costs. Besides that, that would be the difference and that is what you would get. You don’t have to call the bank and then send the money,  we handle all that from our end.

7. How do I know if the home I’m trying to sell needs a probate?

That’s one of those things where we figure it out after we run title, and I would say half the time people don’t know that they even have to get a probate on the property until after we run title and realize that in order to close on the property, transfer title for the warranty deed, you’ll have to do a probate. That doesn’t mean that we can’t purchase the property, it just means that we’re now going to have to go through a legal process in order to clear up the title on the property to be able to transfer it or convey the title legally.

Half the time people don’t know that they need a probate, and sometimes it honestly doesn’t make sense on why, but that’s the way conveyance works. It needs to be shown by the court that you legally own the property before being able to sell it. It does make sense because if it was easy, there would be some fraudulent activity with people trying to take title on other people’s houses, so it is actually for the better.

Unfortunately it does cost money up front and we work with you on those costs and see how we can pay those costs. We can sometimes reduce those costs from the purchase price depending on the situation. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, a lot of these types of distressed homes are not a one-size-fits-all.

8. How long does it take to sell or close on the house?

For you to sell to us and for us to close on it and transfer the title it’s rarely going to take more than 30 days. Typically, if the title’s clear, there’s no outstanding issues that no one knew about it will be in 30 days or less. Maybe 3 weeks. We’ll close on the property and move forward.

If it’s over 30 days, it’s probably going because of an outstanding legal issue or there was unknown circumstances that came up because these situations with distressed homes can sometimes get pretty complicated. We will actively work with you to make sure that we are going to purchase your property as quickly as possible, and that means taking care of business as fast as we can.

Just to reiterate, it typically takes 30 days or less to be able to purchase and close on the property.

9. Where do you buy homes?

So we get people that reach out in, for example, Webster or Ocala or Mascotte or Groveland. Those types of areas that are not densely populated, and we do absolutely buy there. Inverness, we also buy in Tampa, St. Pete, Port Ritchie, Titusville, Melbourne, Palm Coast, Daytona, Ocala, Orlando, of course. Essentially most of Central Florida and then also in some circumstances outside Central Florida.

We will definitely consider your property no matter what we’ll reach out and see if it’s something that we are interested in purchasing no matter the location. There’s not a specific boundary that we look at when we evaluate properties. Just reach out and we’ll see if we are a good fit.

10. Why work with Simple Sale?

At Simple Sale, we operate with different standards than other companies. We operate by being trustworthy, accountable, and transparent. We do that by setting standards for ourselves in every interaction  and in every transaction that we have. We want to be trustworthy.

Everything that we say we’re going to do, we do, and we are working in your best interests and we’re accountable for the things that we do. We work and strive to create great accountability by making Simple Sale accessible on the web and on social media.

If you Google our company you’re gonna find us, you’re gonna see our reviews, you’re gonna see how people felt after working with us. The reviews are also there so people who feel they weren’t treated properly when working with Simple Sale are able to give reviews as well. We keep it open for the good and the bad, and fortunately we’ve had a lot of good along the way.

So accountability is huge and then of course the last and most important is transparency. Just being transparent with a person and completely honest with them about what’s going on. Most people sell a house once or twice in their life. We do it daily, so just letting the seller know what’s really going on from the perspective of someone who sees these types of situations every single day. That transparency is very, very important in creating a good relationship and having a successful transaction through all the situations that may come up.

Wrapping Up

Just to close out, we appreciate you coming by and hearing some of the commonly asked questions that we get here at Simple Sale. We just wanted to have a stream and a video available that answers those questions, not just from writing on a page, but from a real person that sees it every single day.

We work with these properties and deal with these issues every day and I think having this stream and this video can be valuable to educate people without having to take up too much of their time.

Once again, I’m Evan with Simple Sale and we really appreciate you coming by. If you have any questions at all, we’re here on simplesalecentralflorida.com. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Google.

Reach out with any properties that you may have or if you know of other people’s properties. If you’re a Realtor and you know of distressed properties, reach out and see if we’re a good fit. Thank you!