Flip This Wholesaler

9/25/2008

Well, the Deal From Hell continues to live up to it's name... The buyer finally got the money together for the down payment, and everything looked like it was good to go. I spoke to the lady doing the loan at around 3:30 on Tuesday and she said we should be able to close in a few days. I still had not heard from the bank's title company at this point, and I figured I would wait a day or so before I started pushing them to close, because I have learned that "I can get it done in a few days" is loan officer-speak for " I'll get it done whenever I get around to it, and if you try and call me to find out how things are progressing, I will ignore you until you rip all of your hair out of your head in frustration"..... So, anyway, a few hours after I spoke to the loan lady, I get a call from the buyer telling me she had bad news. Apparently, she has another loan with this same lender, and is way late on her payment this month, so they decided to not do the loan after all.

ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME??

The buyer, of course, has some BS story about why she hasn't made the payment yet, and says she is going to go in and speak to the lender first thing in the morning and see if he will still do the loan. I give this about a .0000001 percent chance of happening.

Yesterday morning, I finally get an email from the listing agent telling me that the bank is ready to close. AWESOME. I figured I would give them a taste of their own medicine, and I just ignored the emails, and also shut my phone off for most of the day. We are out of contract anyway, and no one has bothered to even call me or email me up to this point to let me know what is going on, so screw it. Once I turned my phone back on, there was a message from the buyer telling me that she has good news, and they are going to do the loan for her after all. So, I call the loan lady up for the 75th time to ask her what is going on, and she tells me that they will do the loan if the buyer brings in a cashier's check in the morning for the payment she is late on. I called the buyer back and asked her at least 100 times "Mrs. Hancock, ARE YOU SURE you can make that payment tomorrow? ARE YOU SURE? ARE YOU SURE YOU'RE SURE? And, of course, she swears to me up and down that she will be in first thing in the morning with a cashier's check to make the loan current.

Shortly after that, I called the listing agent to ask for an extension until the 30th (next Tuesday). She wasn't too happy about it, but they were the ones who couldn't close on time, so they don't have much of a choice.

And, there you have it. That's where we're at with The Deal From Hell. I am expecting a call any second now from the buyer telling me that something went awry.....or from the lender telling me that they changed their mind again and aren't going to do the loan.....or from the listing agent telling me the bank won't sign the extension and they want to close today.

The other deal that was supposed to close Monday, is still in limbo. I guess they finally got in touch with the attorney who handled the foreclosure on the property, and they are trying to get the one remaining lien taken care of. Or something like that.

Hopefully at least one of these deals will get to closing by the end of the month. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Ahhhh, the glamorous life of a wholesaler...

9/20/2008

I just love the ups and down of this business.....one day you think you're going to close 2 deals in the next week and make ten grand, and then the next, you learn that both deals might crash and burn for reasons that you can not control. Gotta love it.

One of the deals "may" have a title issue that "may" take a few months to resolve. I have not been able to get a straight answer from the title company for a week and a half, so who knows what's going on. Every time I call the lady at the title company, she tells me she will know for sure by the end of the day, and she will call and let me know. Then she never calls, and we start the whole process over the next day. It's supposed to close Monday, but the likelihood of that happening is slim. The buyer, of course, is all ready to go.

The other deal (The Deal From Hell), the buyer is now telling me she is not able to come up with the down payment for the hard money loan that she assured me 500 times she had. So, unless she can come up with it by Monday, things are not looking good. I had a feeling this deal was doomed from the get-go, so I can't say that I am too surprised.

I never heard anything back from the mortgage broker who wants to see me burned at the stake. I was thinking, just for fun, of putting up an ad in the singles section of Craigslist for "men seeking men" with his phone number on it, along with a picture similar to this one:



Hehehehehe.

Gotta go make some offers. I've got about ten out there right now, and plan on making another ten or so this weekend. I've been averaging about 1 deal in every 25-30 offers lately, which is pretty good, I think. I tend to get side tracked, though, especially when I have deals that are going South, and people threatening me.

Au revoir!

9/16/2008

Well, I'm back from Illinois.

The wedding was a blast, and it was great to see old friends and family, but, after 5 days of rain and gray skies (and people asking me why I'm not married yet, and not believing me when I tell them I'm incredibly happy being single), I was delighted to be back in sunny Tampa.

One of the deals I have been working on (I will refer to it as "The Deal from Hell" from now on), has continued on it's downward spiral. I had a bad feeling about this deal from the beginning, and it has turned out much worse than I had anticipated. ..

Let's see.....It all started out when I agreed to take a post-dated check from a stranger for a deposit. This was just plain stupid on my part, and I deserved to have the check bounce.......And bounce it did... So, once I found out the check was not good, I called the buyer and told them they needed to get me the deposit in cash by 10 am the next day or I was cancelling the contract. I met them in the parking lot of their bank the next morning, and, after waiting for an hour or so (It was Friday, so there were at least seven thousand people there cashing checks and doing whatever it is that people do at banks on Fridays), I finally got the cash.

Once I got the deposit- we brought the contract to the hard money lender who is supposed to fund this deal. The lady who was working our file decided to quit (or get fired- we're not sure), the next day, and then the file basically got lost for a few days, until it finally resurfaced, and then the guy who does the inspections/appraisals for this lender, had a family emergency (his Dad died), so, once again, the file just sat there for a few more days......

This brings us up to yesterday, when my buyer finally got fed up with this hard money lender, and decided to look for a new one. I was still in Illinois at the time, and got a call from my buyer telling me they found another lender, but they would only lend part of the purchase price, and they still needed to find 26k from somewhere. At this point, I had pretty much written this whole deal off, and figured that this was going to be my first REO that I was going to have to back out of. It was supposed to close today, and I had no way of lining up financing to buy it myself in that short of time period, and I knew my buyer couldn't either. I still hadn't heard from the bank's title company, though, so I figured there might be a chance that they couldn't close today (this title company sucks ass and never gets deals done on time), and we could buy ourselves some more time.

So, first thing this morning, I get a call from the new lender that my buyer had found while I was gone. Boy oh boy did this guy catch me off guard.... He basically told me, in no uncertain terms, that he was turning me in to the Florida State Attorney's office because I was committing fraud by trying to sell a property that I didn't own, and also because I have been doing simultaneous closings, which, he says, are illegal. Like I said- he totally caught me off guard, and I ended up hanging up on him after he told me that my attorney was also going to jail for doing simultaneous closings. He ended up calling me back a few hours later and letting me know that I should be expecting a call from the FL State Attorney in the next day or so, and that he had told him all about my "fraudulent activity".

GOOD TIMES.

On a lighter note- the bank's title company can't close this deal until Monday at the earliest, and the original hard money lender for this deal is most likely going to do the loan for my buyer (we'll find out tomorrow), so this nightmare just might work out. I am not holding my breath, though...

P.S.
My attorney told me I have nothing to worry about, but I am still worried.

P.P.S.
I am giving myself a raise.

9/10/2008

Well, it's official- I'm on vacation! I'm not technically leaving until tomorrow morning (not too excited about flying on September 11th), but I decided I wasn't going to make any more offers until I get back on Monday. It's tempting, though, as there are a few houses I have my eye on, but I don't want to be working while I'm back home, so I'll just wait until next week.

The two deals that I thought I was going to get, I ended up not getting. The one where the bank initially came down to 63k from 90k and then told me I had to resubmit my offer....well, when I resubmitted my offer, they only came down to 87k and wouldn't budge. WTF? And I even raised the earnest money from 1k to 2.5k! This is what I mean when I say that there is no rhyme or reason to what the banks do, and also why I LOVE low balling the shit out of them and taking them to the cleaners. They deserve it, as far as I'm concerned...... The other deal where I was in a bidding war with 3 other people, ended up turning into a bidding war with every wholesaler in Tampa, so I highly doubt I'm going to get it now. Can't wait to see how high it goes, though.

I've got one deal that is supposed to close on Tuesday, but I don't think the title company is going to be ready to close on time, and for once, I hope they aren't. In a nutshell, the hard money lender who is supposed to fund this deal, dropped the ball, and as a result, the inspection/appraisal has not even been done yet (should have been done last week), and I don't think there is a chance in hell that they will be able to fund it on Tuesday. This is partially my fault for not following up/babysitting like I should have been. Sometimes I forget that part of my job is to make sure other people are doing theirs.

Well, gotta run. I'll try to update at least once while I'm in beautiful, Middle of Nowhere Illinois...



It's not snowing there yet, is it?

8/18/2008

I've been keeping an eye on Fay all day, and it now looks like it (she?) is going to make landfall quite a bit South of Tampa. You just never know, though, they've been known to change direction at the last minute- hurricanes are sneaky like that. You should have seen the grocery store today- geeze Louise, what a friggin ZOO. I left and went back 3 times because I am just not good at waiting in line (to be honest, I don't think there is a person on Earth who hates waiting in line as much as I do), but finally realized the place was going to be mobbed all day and night, so I braved the crowds and went in to get Jim some dog food. I'm pretty sure I saw more people buying beer and wine than buying water, but that's generally how it goes the day before a hurricane hits- lots of hurricane parties going on.....

I met with a local hard money lender today that I found by snooping around on the county clerk's website. I spend A LOT of time on that website.... You can find out lots, and lots, and lots, of good info on there. Anyway, so I found this hard money lender who does not run credit or verify income, and they loan up to 80% of appraised value. What's the catch? Well, they charge 10 points upfront (yikes), and want 20% down and 10.65% interest. No pre-payment penalty, though. They also do refis with the same terms (minus the 20% down). I asked the lady how business was (although, I already knew the answer to that question, due to my private investigative work... hehe), and she said they were crazy busy because lending has tightened up so much recently, and they are pretty much the only game in town. I think it's great that they are capitalizing on the market conditions and making a killing in the process... God bless 'em- that's what I say.

This week I am doing nothing but seeking out new lenders (small local banks, and hard money), and finding new buyers - those are the keys to success in this market.....as far as I can tell, anyway.

Buenas nachos!