All Forum Posts by: Eric James

boy I wish ours went like that..  thats a great outcome.. and back to what I always say this stuff is state specific. did you also have to put the agreed amount of the purchase price into escrow on the closing date or could you just hold your money and prosecute the action ?

great advice Stuart and all for free got to love BP..  as an aside I think if the seller went in contract with the wholesaler and then expired.  At least out this way that contract is dead no longer a contract.  So it stops right there.

Secondly you see folks bluster about specific performance on this site all the time and unless there is hundreds of thousands of equity someone is trying to get it rarely is a viable option.  I have done one SP case in my entire 50 years and I won.. but let me lay out the details of how and why.

1. I advanced 50k to pay back taxes..
2. like most contracts for distressed property it was all cash at close.
3. on the closing date I moved in all the cash to buy it  6 figures
4. Seller no shows and goes dark.
5. I try and try but Seller was a massive hoarder and just would not reply.
6. We sue for performance as I did have multiple six figure upside given that it was a demo and build three new homes. And I had 50k at risk.
7. lawsuit takes about 2 years  seller NEVER EVER respond Judge made us go the fully Monty before he would rule. As they don't like to take property from a homeowner.
8. 2 years of litigation was 25k ish. and of course no attorney is going to take this on contingent of success so you have to pay.
9. We finally get the ruling from the judge ordering seller to sign.
10. Seller still refuses and we have to go back into court to get an amended order
11. Title company set to close it but wants a 90 day cooling off period if the seller appeals or something comes up before they will deliver the title and give me insurance.
12. almost 3 year later now we close and get our title insurance so we have also have fines to deal with and 3 more years of tax's
13. Seller still wont move so we have to evict that takes another 6 to 7 months to have the authorities escort them out.

And so in our case about 250k in cash sitting in escrow for 3 years and we finally won :) Tear down houses build three new ones and we still made a nice profit but not as much as if we just closed the darn thing of course.. So how many folks are going to do this because they think they have left 30 or 50k of equity in a deal and are upset. ??? how many people have the cash to let it sit there for years.  Just because you sue for performance the seller does not perform you as the buyer still has to.  these are the little parts most folks miss on the internet .. IE sue the bastards  LOL. Of course this was Oregon law your law could be different.

 Yes, I used to live within a few miles of the border. I didn't see any problems with squatters. I only had one run in with a squatter at a tax sale property and they weren't an immigrant. I have rentals now further north in TX and I can tell you there was a much better class of tenants close to the border.

@Eric James can you say more about what you mean by that?

i worry a lot more about what my rental properties can rent for than I do about their 'price'

Quote from @Jack B.:

Quote from @Greg Scott:

Quote from @Jack B.:

What the inflation adjusted home price history does not account for is home sizes. A lot has changed since the 1960s.

Most of the boomers grew up in a 1,200 sqft ranch with one bathroom on 0.1 acre. They also had only one car and a stay at home mom raising 3.6 kids.

Today the average new built home is about 2,500 sqft, often 4 bed 3 bath for 1.9 kids. They have multiple cars, both spouses are working at least one job and they have multiple cars. Of course this costs more.

Every comodity market has ebbs and flows, that's why people observe it as cyclical. But there is no pacemaker that drives 18 year cycles or any other number of year cycles.

Home prices hinge on cost of labor and cost of materials plus cost of land. You can follow that metric. Existing homes are driven by supply and demand. We have underbuilt housing for 14 years following 2008 and now we are 3-4 million homes short (some banks say 5), that will take a decade to catch up as a nation.  

However, some markets like TX have already built massive amounts of new homes (126,000 last year if I recall correctly), while my home State Wisconsin has built not even a tenth of that. In fact new construction in Milwaukee is almost non existant, so we have a chronic housing shortage (both for rent and for sale) but very little additional inventory. They build large homes in the suburbs, but with cost of labor and materials where they are these house are twice the median price for our market and provide no real inventory relief.  This is just an example how local markets can behave totally different.

Home prices are what we call "downward sticky". You can say they go up like a rocket and come down like a feather. Sellers won't sell if they don't get what they expect, they just stay put and wait for the market to catch up (except 2008, when they were forced to sell). If they have the choice, they will just wait until inflation has brought wages up enough. We see a lot more of a cycle in home sales volume than we see with home prices - prices are much more linear than volume.