Live Q&A Recording – July 17th, 2020

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!