Trusting the “Expert”
Long Story...
My husband and I have been wholesaling for a little over a year. When we first started out we were introduced to this guy who had been in real estate for years. I, myself am big on mentors. I had the mindset, this is a new venture for us. I had just closed my daycare business and we needed someone to mentor us. So we meet this guy who said he does real estate classes. They are $600 per person but he’d give us a deal for 1K. We said ok. Did the class, which was a total waste because we could have googled what was “taught”. We get through the classes and we just kept stumbling on these wholesale deals. One month we’d do a deal, next month a couple deals and another month no deal. He kept telling us our system was wrong and that he could fix it. He then told us he could do a website because that’s where most of his leads came from. I agreed. Having had a business myself a lot of my parents came from looking at my website. Anyways, that was $400. He then started telling us that we need not to wholesale but start investing. We told him our credit was not in the best of shape. We had been communicating with this guy for the past 3 or 4 months so the trust was there. It seemed like he had our best interest at heart. He starting talking about hard money loans and how we didn’t need good credit. Once we agreed to do the hard money loan he then said that credit plays a part in it and that he’d put the property in his name for us so that we can buy, fix and flip. We gave him 8K for an 80K hard money loan in November (no contract in place) I KNOW, I KNOW. Kicking myself every time I think about it. My husband and I have looked at a lot of properties but he’d tell us the property won’t work for some odd reason. When I started asking for the money he said that he’d found a property and also has found a 16 unit in another state. We went and seen the property and my suspicions started getting to me because this guy is saying that he’s going to do the rehab! My intuitions started kicking in when he went a found a property without us knowing and supposedly put our money into a multi family unit. He is due to close on the 25th for the property he found (which has switched from the 17th) he showed me the contract on his phone. I told him to email me and he said he couldn’t do it.
I know that we should not have done this without a contract in place. I feel like this guy took total advantage of us being new to real estate and trusting him. I just want our money back and move forward.
Any suggestions would help.
Thanks