Selling a House With Bad Tenants In Miami-Dade? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

A duplex, two tenants, and only one of them had to move

Brownsville

A couple going through a divorce, and a duplex between them. Small multifamily is often the hardest asset for a separating couple to unpick, because it is a home and a business at the same time. Both units were rented, both were let well under what they should have been, and the whole thing had been managed loosely for a long time — which is what tends to happen to a property while two people are busy separating.

The condition explained the rents. The air conditioning leaked. There were holes in the floor that somebody had dealt with by laying carpet over the top of them. It needed a roof, new subflooring underneath that carpet, and both bathrooms and the kitchen doing properly.

We closed, and then had to make a decision about two people's homes.

The tenant in the main house was a decent man who was not willing to pay market rent — and honestly, for a house in that state, he was right not to. But the work that needed doing could not be done around somebody living there. So we offered him cash for keys, he took it, and he moved on his own terms with money in hand.

The gentleman in the detached unit at the back is still living there today. There was never any reason for him to move, so he did not.

That is usually how this goes, and it is worth saying plainly because people assume the opposite: buying an occupied building does not mean clearing it. We needed one unit empty to do real work. We did not need the other one, so we left it alone.

The tenants said they would buy it, and a year went by

Miami Gardens

She inherited the house she grew up in, in Miami Gardens, and let it to a family.

The rent stopped being reliable. And every time it came up, the tenants said they wanted to buy the place. As far as anyone could tell they meant it. They simply could not qualify for a mortgage.

That went on for about a year. Not paying, then talking about buying. Not paying, then talking about buying.

It is a particular kind of stuck, and it catches people who are trying to be decent about it. You do not want to move against a family who tell you they are close to buying the house. So you wait. And while you wait you are not collecting rent you can rely on, you are not selling to anybody else, and the house is not getting any newer. A year of that is a year of decisions you never actually got to make.

She had had enough of it. She also did not want to start putting money into repairs, which is a fair call — repairs do not fix a tenancy. What she wanted was somebody who could actually close, and she came to us.

We bought it with the family still in it. Then we paid them to leave and gave them time to do it. Not a notice and a court date — money in hand and enough weeks to find somewhere else, because a family who wanted to buy a house are not a problem to be removed. They were people whose plan had not worked.

Once it was empty we repaired everything, which was always going to have to happen and none of which could happen around people living there. The order is the whole thing: the tenancy first, properly and at our cost, then the work.

A year of being told the house is about to sell is not the same as a house being about to sell. That was what she could not get out of on her own.

Six units, and an illegal casino in the downstairs one

Little Haiti

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.