Need To Sell Your House In Allapattah? We Buy Houses For Cash.

Probate moves slowly, and neither the taxes nor the lender were waiting

An inherited duplex in Allapattah, with more or less everything happening at once. It had to go through probate. It was two years behind on taxes. And it was going into foreclosure, because what had been inherited was the house and the mortgage together.

Those things do not queue politely. Probate is the slow one, and it is also the one that has to come first, because until an estate is open there is nobody with the authority to sell anything. So the heirs were in a position where the answer to the taxes and the answer to the foreclosure was to sell the property — and they could not sell the property yet.

The duplex was tenanted. The tenants were good people and they were paying well below market rent, which is a fact about the building rather than about them. What it meant in practice was that the property was not producing enough to service the mortgage, let alone catch up two years of taxes on top.

Nobody inherits that combination equipped for it. Any one of probate, tax arrears or a foreclosure is a project on its own. Arriving together, with a hard deadline on two of the three, they are a full-time job that costs money well before it produces any.

So there were three things to do, and all of them had to happen before we owned anything. We paid the probate attorneys to get the file started, because the estate had to be open before anything else could move at all. We paid the two years of back taxes, so the house could not be lost on the tax side while the probate side was still grinding. And we sent our purchase agreement to the lender.

That last one is the least obvious and worth explaining. A lender in a foreclosure is not trying to take a house — it is trying to be repaid. A signed contract tells them the money is coming and roughly when, and that is a completely different conversation from silence. Silence is what most of these files have in them.

None of that is dramatic. It is three things paid for and set moving in the right order, before closing, on a property we did not own yet. It is also the difference between an estate that sells a duplex and an estate that loses one.

Four units, unpermitted work, and a tenant who called the city

A fourplex in Allapattah — a quadplex, the way most people around here say it — that needed every repair there is. That part was simple enough. The complicated part was what had already been done to it.

The owner had carried out a number of repairs without pulling permits. People do that for a reason that is easy to understand — permits cost money and take time, and the work in front of you is real and needs doing now. It is also the decision that turns a maintenance problem into a records problem, and the records problem is the expensive one.

Then one of the tenants fell out with him and called code enforcement. It is worth being fair about that. A tenant who reports unpermitted electrical and plumbing work in the building he lives in is not doing anything unreasonable. But it meant the city was looking now, and the violations were open.

Which put the owner in a corner. Curing it was not a few weekends. It meant engineering plans drawn up first, then permits pulled for electrical, plumbing and the rest, then inspections, then whatever the inspections turned up. Tens of thousands of dollars, and several months at the optimistic end — realistically closer to a year. He had neither the money nor the time, and the building stayed full of people the whole time none of it was happening.

So he sold it to us. We took on the record, and we took on the tenants — including the one who had made the call.

That is the honest description of a purchase like this. It is not a discount on a building. It is somebody taking on a process with a firm start date and no reliable end date, on a property that stays occupied the whole way through. The owner was out from under it in a matter of weeks. Getting out from under it properly took a great deal longer than that, and it was ours to do.

Two open permits, a tenant, and no reason for anyone to move

This house came with two open permits that had violations attached to them — one for the roof, one for an air conditioning changeout — and a tenant living in it on a month-to-month basis.

Any one of those on its own is usually enough to end a conventional sale. A retail buyer needs a mortgage, the lender and the title company want a clean record, and an occupied property with unresolved permits is not something they will wait around for. Together, the three of them made the house very difficult to sell to anybody at all.

We bought it as it stood. The permits became our problem from the day we closed, rather than a list of things the owner had to work through first at their own cost.

And we kept the tenant. They seem like good people, and there was no reason to put them out of their home in order to buy a building. The plan is to improve the house around them, so that staying is the easy choice. Selling an occupied property does not have to mean somebody loses somewhere to live.