SUCCESSFUL REAL ESTATE INVESTING REQUIRES A GOOD LAWYER

Written by Posted On Tuesday, 13 June 2017 10:39
SUCCESSFUL REAL ESTATE INVESTING REQUIRES A GOOD LAWYER SUCCESSFUL REAL ESTATE INVESTING REQUIRES A GOOD LAWYER Los Angeles Lawyers

I have earned a living as a real estate broker for almost fifteen years, sometimes doing well, but usually struggling. Five years ago, I began investing in residential real estate, renovating and refurbishing promising properties, with the idea of holding the properties as investments, but also renting them out, in order to produce some monthly rental income.


With one of my rental properties, I ran into some legal problems. I refinanced the property three times, but didn’t pay close enough attention to one of those transactions. When I refinanced the property the most recent time, everyone thought that the new mortgage would be in the “second” position, behind the first Deed of Trust. But it was not until this past fall that we discovered that the first deed of trust, in the amount of approximately $200,000 had been “reconveyed in error in 2014 and a rescission of reconveyance had been recorded in 2015.” The effect of this is that the finance company that thought they had a second deed of trust, in fact had only a third deed of trust, and were largely “out of the money.” This was only discovered when their title insurance company did some deep digging into the specifics of the chain of title.

 

eanwhile, I was making monthly mortgage payments, and I believed that I was current and up to date with both the first trust deed and the second trust deed. As to the third trust deed, the loan had been assigned to a new company, and I truly did not know where and to whom I was supposed to send my monthly payments. But I wasn’t too worried, since I was definitely current with my first and second mortgages. Nevertheless, I sat down with an experienced Los Angeles Real Estate Attorney, and explained the situation. They began to sort things out.

 

This was the smartest thing I could have done, since, shortly thereafter, I received a Notice of Default, and then a Notice of Trustee’s Sale … boy, was I surprised ! My Los Angeles Real Estate Attorney jumped into action, and negotiated with the Title Insurance Company, and was able to convince the Title Insurance Company to write a $300,000 check to pay off the First Trust Deed completely, thus ending the risk of foreclosure.

 

Of course, that’s not the end of the story, since I – as owner of the property – benefited directly from that $300,000 payment, and will have to at least partially reimburse the Title Insurance Company. But my ever-so-skillful Real Estate Attorney is negotiating a compromised settlement, in which (hopefully) I will only have to reimburse part of that amount.

 

In the meantime, the property has been on the market, and – thanks to some landscaping and a new coat of paint – is steadily increasing in value.

 

The moral of the story is that a real estate investor is every bit as smart as their smartest legal advisor. We ourselves don’t need to know everything, so long as we hire a Los Angeles team of professionals that (together) either know everything, or can figure it out.

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