Probate Sellers

Thursday evening I met with a nice lady and her brothers who had inherited property from an uncle who passed away back in June of 07. Of course, they all got a letter from me back then and the executor held onto my letter and decided to call me last week.

There was equity, so I set an appointment.

The meeting went well and since they need to sell in a pretty short time period (45 days) I was the best deal going.

The home comps at $245k and has 12-15,000 of repairs to make it sell-able on the market. With carpet, paint and some updating to the bathrooms (6-8k) you'd have a nice rental.

The offer I made was for $136,600 since one of the garage doors needed to be replaced. I said I'd love to offer more, but until I knew more specifically how much it would cost to get that garage door in there I'd have to stick with the offer.

Well, wouldn't you know it, she called upstairs to her brother in law who just happens to work in the garage repair business! What are the chances of that happening? Of course, they added the 5k that we were talking about for the repair/replacement of the garage door on to my offer and after a little more back & forth we settled on $142,600 as my offer price.

Since there are a total of 6 heirs and I had 3 there with me, I moved forward with filling out the offer paperwork, something of an assumed close on my part. They had to wait to talk to all the other heirs before moving forward with the offer papers.

I would have liked to have walked out of there with a signed contract, but with probate I feel like I have more ability to be flexible & understanding since they have the challenge of trying to get all the heirs on the same page to get the property sold. Plus, I was the only person besides a realtor that they had heard from about the property. Less competition, less pressure to get a signature on the first visit.

She was supposed to call me Friday afternoon, but when the phone didn't ring I wasn't surprised. One of the heirs lives in El Salvador, so getting in touch with her is going to take more than just a quick call in the car on the way home from work.

With an offer price 100k below the comps in the neighborhood, I am confident that I'll be able to sell it once I get a signed contract.

More call-backs on Saturday and hopefully scheduling some follow up appointments for the other 5 properties I looked at last week.

At least my probates are finally starting to pay off.

Thanks for checking in-
Taylor

-Taylor