Selling a House With Liens or Code Violations 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.

Eleven units, and a seller who had run out of road

This was an eleven-unit multifamily building, and the owner had simply had enough of it. Not one catastrophe — a queue of them, each one needing money and attention before the next could be dealt with.

The recertification was due, which is not a form you fill in. It means hiring engineers, letting them tell you what is wrong with the structure and the electrics, and then paying for whatever they find. There were squatters in the building. There were evictions that had to be run properly, through the court. And underneath all of that, units that could not be rented in the condition they were in, which meant the building was costing money every month instead of making it.

Any one of those is manageable. Together they are a full-time job, and the owner did not want it to be his full-time job. That is a completely reasonable position to take, and it is one we hear often from people who own small buildings.

So it became ours. We got the engineers in and took the recertification through. We moved the squatters out and ran the evictions to the end. Then the work: new kitchens and new bathrooms throughout, a new roof, and the driveway repaved. All of it permitted — which is slower and more expensive than not doing it that way, and it is the only version that leaves a building somebody else can buy or finance later.

The units are rented again. A building like this only works when they are, and getting back to that took every one of those steps.

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