Posted by Kristine-CA on June 12, 2005 at 11:58:15:
You are missing a lot of facts about probate and motivated sellers.
Also about foreclosure. Here in CA, you usually cannot probate an
estate in the four months that the foreclosure process takes.
Probate is one possible source of motivaed sellers. The bulk of estates
do not need to sell asap. And for properties sold out of probate to pay
off estate debt there are state regs such as selling priced needs to be
95% of probate appraised value–that makes probate not a good
source of deals for most investors.
But if you are into solving problems–problem properties, tricky title
issues, buying interests and paying for the legal work, and/or fronting
money to the heirs, there are definitely deals to be had.
You may want to search the archives on this topic. There are lots of
threads with questions similar to yours. Kristine
Assuming for the moment that said deals aren’t figments of somebody’s imagination, when somebody claims to regularly purchase property at 20-30% discounts, most of which are not in terrible disrepair or subject to great family squabbling, I have to ask “why does this happen?” After all, it’s trivial for the executor to find any random realtor and list the sucker (assuming SFHs, which nearly all probated properties are), and mortgagees can rarely foreclose fast enough to beat the estate’s sale of the home.