Shirley's San Antonio Real Estate Blog: Behind on your payments? Don’t fall victim to scams, ask a licensed professional for help!

If you are behind on your payments, you may be looking for any help you can find. But, don’t fall victim to scams, ask a licensed professional for help! You see, every day people are looking for new ways to scam home owners who are in trouble and today I heard of yet another and this one just makes me mad.

What these scammers do is wait for the notice of default list to come out and then approach the home owners who are in trouble and promise them help getting out from under their mortgage without having to pay them a dime! They tell them, “If you go to a real estate agent, they are going to charge you 6%-7%, who do you think pays that? It certainly won’t be the bank, you will in the form of a note.” (Of course, as we know this is a lie, but to a home owner who is trouble this sounds pretty convincing.)

They tell the home owner, “You will need to move out, the bank won’t want to do a short sale with someone who is still in the house, they are afraid you are going to stay after the sale.” Then they say, “We will approach the bank with a completely staged home that is sale ready and we will put one of our buyers in and the bank has to say yes because the buyer is already in the house. It is a win-win as our buyer is already in the house. This takes about a total of six months, but you won’t have to pay any more payments and your credit will be saved.”

Here is the problem…

Then this person puts a renter in the property for that six months, all the while the home owner thinks the payments are being taken care of by the “NEW BUYER”. The scammer is collecting rents on a property that he doesn’t even own. Well, we all know what happens after six months. The property gets foreclosed on, the renters are out, the seller is out and scammers made a good $10,000 and are nowhere to be found because they used a fake name.

This is the call I got today from a lady who was crying on the phone because she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t realize it was a scam until the day after the auction, that is how good these people were. I told her to contact a lawyer and the police immediately as this was a crime. I couldn’t do more than that for her, but I can warn others of this scam. People like this that are willing to take advantage of people when they are already down need to be put in jail for a very, very long time!

 

Todd Clark - Broker / Sales Coach
Palazzo Realty Group
Phone: (503)524-9494
Fax: (503)622-8739

©2009 Todd Clark - Behind on your payments? Don’t fall victim to scams, ask a licensed professional for help!