Probably a year ago, someone posted a house for sale on Facebook. Since it was a place I recognized, I was interested in reading about it. Something I noticed right away is that the picture showed the whole house. It was a duplex, and 1/2 the house is occupied. The description made it sound as if the house was a single family dwelling, and that the picture was what the buyer was getting. It wasn't.
The first thing that I noticed was that they were attempting to attract people who could not get traditional financing. They did the financing. In fact they insisted that they do the financing. They didn't accept a bank mortgages. They said that they were trying to help people who struggled, whose credit might not be good enough to qualify for a mortgage.
In other words, they were targeting desperate people.
The other thing that I noticed is this. The house is very run down. Part of the purchase agreement was that the "buyer" needed to sign a paper agreeing to do repairs on a scheduled basis in addition to paying that 'low, low house payment'. (Spoiler: it was not a low payment. While I cannot remember what it was, it was every bit as high as paying rent.)
What made me sick was this: the sheer number of people wanting to know more about this. Scores of comments.
I put my own comment on it. I said, "Do NOT enter into an agreement with these people. Basically, this is a very run down house, and they are looking for other people to do the renovations for them. Not only that, they make you sign a time line of the repairs to be done, and make it clear that if you do not keep up with their time line, you will lose the house. I will bet money that the intention here is to get their house fixed up at no cost. I will also bet money that anyone entering into an agreement with this company will never own that house. This is a very unethical situation. Before you sign anything, you need to take the paperwork to a lawyer."
Of course the people "selling" this house were upset about this. They launched into me saying that they had been in the business of "helping people move into home ownership" for many years. I looked up their business license and called BS on that. It was a relatively new company.
They tried to tell me that I did not know how buying a house works. (HA!) I told them that we'd been buying and selling houses since 2008 and I knew exactly how it worked. I also said, "Okay. if this is on the up and up, I want to buy your house. I won't need to finance through you. We will purchase in cash."
I waited. No response.
"Proof of funds available." Again, no response.
So I posted the name of our lawyer and his phone number. I urged people to refuse to sign anything without having a lawyer look the paperwork over, pointing out that no lawyer would say that it was a good idea to pour money into fixing up a house that was not even in your name and wouldn't be in your name for many years.
I was blocked. But I kept an eye on that duplex and saw that after a few months, they found someone to move in.
I've been doing a lot of walking, all over town. I really try to get in at least two miles a day. Last weekend, I had Tim drop me off on the west end of town and I walked home. I walked by that house, and I saw a young couple with two small children loading up a shabby truck and a U-haul trailer.
I had so many questions. But I talked to the children who were playing on the sidewalk, and kept on going.
How do people sleep at night?
