Buying property with no money, from a man who doesn’t own it.

“But Walker,” she said, “look how cheap it is! I can sell it for at least twice that – that’s good profit.”

Two things,” I countered, “first, the house is missing it’s back half, and, secondly, this is out in No Where, SC.”

She just gave me The Look followed by the Quiet Act. No man could persevere that defense.

So, when we got home, I wrote up the contract.

We met the owners a week later. In our preliminary research, we saw that he had missed several tax payments. When I brought this up to him, he said he had that under control; he had caught up on the taxes and he owned it free and clear. Not a problem.

That was good enough for us, so I laid the contract on his hood and pointed to the places for him to sign.

After all signatures were in place and all preliminaries finished, we took it to our lawyer (So much for due diligence).

Our lawyer looked the deed over and told us that our seller did not own the property.

It had, in fact, been sold at a tax auction a couple of weeks previously. It could, he told us, be returned to the owner if he caught up on his taxes.

So, our seller did what he needed to do to have legal ownership of the property, and we simply waited while he did so.

It took a couple of months, but our seller finally owned the property he sold, so the process moved forward.

At that point, we only had one obstacle: money – we still didn’t have any.

Of course a little fact like that didn’t discourage my lovely Beatriz.

TIME TO ADVERTISE

I put the property up on the standard real estate sites. I don’t know how many calls we got, but it couldn’t have been many.

Until we got one that had promise.

When he called, we agreed on the price and the generalities of a contract. Everything was good, so I could start the contract right then, and we could meet later to sign it. I was on the phone, pen in hand, while I asked him the standard questions.

THE RED FLAG!

Our first little hic-up came when I asked him his name.

He gave me his first and last.

When I asked about his middle name, he hesitated and mumbled something like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I need to get my passport.’

That was disconcerting.

I mean, It’s possible people forget their middle names. Never heard of it, but it’s possible.

I guess.

To be fair, we weren’t exactly forth-coming either. You see, our ad might have been a little optimistic. I mean, sure, it could be lived in ‘as-is’ . . . if you were a rodent or maybe a crow or something. But, at the time, Beatriz and I thought a person who could handle a real fixer-upper could live there while he or she rebuilt the back half. It had electrical and water access. It was possible.

We met our prospective buyer in the food court at the local mall. We sat down at a table and began talking and getting to know each other. I was, understandably, suspicious of a man who did not know his own middle name, so I asked for his ID. Yep, it was his picture. Yep, his name was as he said – even his middle name. So I dropped the subject.

Apparently, he went by the house and looked it over carefully. He informed us that the sewage wasn’t even connected – there was no way it was habitable ‘as-is’. (I guess I should have looked under the house.)

So we went down on the price.

To me it was still an insanely high price, but to my amazement, he said, OK.

A fool? A desperado who just escaped a prison – or an insane asylum perhaps?

Don’ know, don’ care – he had funds in the bank, and, after all, I have a kindly spirit; it’s not for me to judge.

At that point it was time to close the deal.

As I mentioned before – we were broke. There was no way we were closing our purchase with what we had in the bank. But I took care of that little obstacle in the contract.

According to the contract, he had to give us a healthy down payment (call it earnest money if you want). The amount he gave us was equal to our cost.

And we’ll take that now, if you don’t mind.

so we used his money to buy it, and then sold it right back to him.

Easy-Peasy!