Selling an Inherited House In Little Haiti? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Two frame houses with demolition orders, and a loan already due

A duplex in Little Haiti, which in practice meant two dilapidated frame houses on the one property. Both were carrying demolition orders.

The area has value, and that is worth saying first because it changes what the problem actually was. This was not a property nobody wanted. The land was worth something and the two structures standing on it were finished — and the city had already said so, in writing.

She had inherited the property, and she had inherited a reverse mortgage along with it. When the last borrower on one of those dies, the loan becomes due and payable. It does not turn into an ordinary mortgage with payments to pick up. It is simply due, and a clock starts.

Where there is equity — and here there was — the payoff is the loan balance. The sale clears it and what is left over belongs to the estate. So the equity was real and it was hers. What threatened it was never the appraisal. It was time. Interest accrues. So does the mortgage insurance premium, the servicing fees, the property inspections, the force-placed insurance. Every month the balance climbs against a number that does not, and the surplus at the end of it gets smaller.

The property was not sitting still either. There were squatters in it. The water had never been shut off, so a bill ran the whole time on a building nobody was living in lawfully. And the squatters were taking electricity from the neighbours, which made it the neighbours’ problem as well as hers.

So: two structures under demolition orders, a loan on a clock, a utility account still running, and people in the buildings. Repairing her way out was not a real option, because the city had already ruled on the structures. The only route that ended with money in her hands was a sale — and a sale before the balance ate what was left of it.

We bought it and the loan was cleared at closing, with the surplus going where it was supposed to go. Then the structures came down, which the demolition orders had already required of somebody, and two townhomes went up in their place.

An inherited reverse mortgage is a deadline more than it is a debt. The house is usually worth roughly what it is worth. What decides how much of that anybody actually sees is how quickly it gets dealt with.

Six units, and an illegal casino in the downstairs one

A six unit multifamily building in Little Haiti, inherited, and the family had no appetite for putting money into it. On its own that is an ordinary position and we hear it constantly. This building had a second thing going on.

There was an illegal casino running out of the downstairs unit. The family did not want to deal with those people, and that is not squeamishness. It is a fair reading of the situation. Whatever you decide to do about an operation like that, you are the one who has to go and do it, and afterwards you are the one they know.

It also rules out the normal route. You cannot market a building like that in the usual way — a listing means disclosure, and it means strangers walking through the property on scheduled afternoons, and whoever was running that unit would have worked out inside a week that something was happening. So the sale was not announced to the building. Tenants are not party to the sale of the property they live in, there was no reason for any of them to be told in advance, and there was one very good reason not to.

Then the part worth being straight about: the man running it was not a problem. He was a nice guy. He knew everybody on that block and everybody knew him, and there was nothing to be gained by making an enemy of him or an example of him. We did not want to give him any trouble either.

So he was given a few months to move his games somewhere else, and he moved them. No incident. Nobody else had to be involved. The thing the sellers had not been willing to walk into turned out to be a conversation and a deadline that nobody thought was unfair — but they had no way of knowing that in advance, and neither did we. That is most of what gets bought in a building like this. Not the certainty that something is bad. The uncertainty about whether it is.

Then it took about a year. We cleared the units one at a time rather than all at once, which matters more than it sounds: a six unit building emptied in one go earns nothing at all while the work runs, and this work did not run quickly. Kitchens and bathrooms throughout. A new roof. Impact windows, which meant pulling permits and then waiting on them.

At the end of it the rents moved to where they made sense for what the units had become. That is the right way round, and it is the part people skip when they talk about raising rents. The rents were not the project. The year was the project.

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