Selling a House That Needs Repairs In North Miami? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

A new roof, laid straight on top of the old one

The contractor they hired laid the new roof directly on top of the old one instead of tearing the old one off. He did the same thing with the patio. No permit was pulled for any of it.

They paid for that roof. They believed it had been done properly. And they now hold a violation for unpermitted work they commissioned in good faith and had no way of knowing was wrong.

What happens next is worth following carefully, because it is the same chain for a great many Florida owners and almost nobody lays it out:

The roof leaks, because it was never really a new roof. The insurer finds out and starts writing letters asking for proof the work is being put right. Putting it right means permits, an engineer, and doing the roof properly this time — real money, which they did not have between them. While that stalls, mold starts growing inside the house. The property taxes come due. And if the insurer drops them, which was exactly where this was heading, the mortgage itself is in trouble, because a lender requires the house to be insured.

On top of all of it, the couple were going through a divorce.

Any one of those things is manageable. All of them at once, with no money and no agreement between the two of you, is not. It is not a failure of character. It is a chain reaction that started with one contractor cutting one corner.

We bought the house. They got their money and thirty days to leave, and we started pulling permits to correct the roof.

Not only so that we can sell it. So that it can be insured at all — and so the next family who buys it can actually be approved for a mortgage. A house in that condition cannot be financed by anybody, which is precisely why the chain is so hard to break from the inside.

If any of that sounds familiar, the moment to deal with it is before the insurance company makes the decision for you.

A single-family house with five kitchens in it

At some point the owners had carved this single-family house into five separate units. Five kitchens. In one house. You have to see it to quite believe it.

And it was heading into foreclosure at the same time.

Nobody would go near it, and there is a straightforward reason for that. A house in that state cannot be bought with an ordinary mortgage — no lender will lend against it and no insurer will write a policy on it — so the number of people who are actually able to buy it drops to almost nobody. Meanwhile the foreclosure clock carried on running, which is the part that made it urgent rather than merely difficult.

We closed in about twenty days. We took on the tenancies that came with it and worked through them after closing, rather than asking the owners to empty the place first — which they had no means of doing and no time to do.

The foreclosure was avoided. Then we gutted the building and put it back to being a house.

The properties nobody will touch tend to be the ones where speed matters most, because the owner has the fewest options left and the least time to use them.