My first (bad) investment experience with Roofstock

[Anandakumar Elumalai]

After spending almost half a year in reading the forums, books etc finally I got ready to do my first investment on Roofstock. I really liked a property that was from Memphis, TN. It was listed as a 'open house' property.

I made an offer of 175K. After the 'open house' period, the seller had 24 hrs to review and select an offer (according to Roofstock website). If the Seller does not take any action, the property gets listed in Roofstock again.

I did not receive any response during the seller review. One of the Roofstock representative told Seller has not accepted any offer and the property will be getting listed on roofstock again. He gave me the exact time at which it will be coming to open market.

I waited until then and when the property was available on the open market I purchased it. I got confirmation from Roofstock that the purchase was successful and I got a questionnaire to fill out. Market fees was debited on my card. My wife double checked and confirmed with Roofstock representative that we actually got the property. So far so good.

All these happened on Saturday.

Following Monday, got a one line text from Roofstock that the purchase was cancelled . I logged on to their website and the property was marked as 'Off the market'. I tried again after 30 mins to see it was in 'Sale pending' stage which means it was sold to someone else.

I wrote an email to roofstock asking for details. I am just getting weak apology replies stating it was their fault and would waiver the market fee on the next purchase.

What is interesting is that a Roofstock representative was closely working with me while I placed the order and confirmed that purchase went through fine and congratulated on the first purchase. Not sure what happened in between.

It is very frustrating.

Has this happened to anyone else?

I do not think this is normal. I am getting lot of questions in my mind and still have not heard anything convincing from roofstock.

[Zach Evanish]

@Anandakumar Elumalai

We are sorry for your recent experience on Roofstock.

As explained in our email exchanges:

• all offers, including yours, were made available to the seller
• the system did fail to cancel all pending offers after the review period ended and our engineering team is looking into what happened and working to correct this error

We can also confirm:

• your third offer to purchase the home after it was erroneously listed (given negotiations were on-going and had not been cancelled) after the review period was made available to the seller, who rejected it given the current higher offers he was negotiating
• the seller was negotiating after the review period (this is the system error noted above that we are working on) with parties who bid on the property during the open house period and whose initial bids were higher
• the seller is currently in contract with a buyer with whom he was negotiating with in the review period (and later) at a price in excess of your offers

• we confirmed that an email was sent to your email address on July 14th @ 9 am that your offer expired due to the seller not taking any action

Lastly, one of our executives reached out to you via telephone a week or so ago and if you would like to discuss this matter further please feel free to call him.

We hope this clarifies what happened and again we apologize for the inconvenience.