Why do we think rent-to-own agreements and land contracts are scams?
Some quotes:
“My big problem with the culture there was that we knowingly manipulated people’s bad situations for our own gain. When people presented us with their problems like ‘oh i need a little help with this, i need a little bit of help with that, i can’t swing that,’ they were pretty much ridiculed. They were never worked with.”
This was especially relevant when it came to contract agreements and inspections. Houses advertised in the Green Bay area consisted of broken pipes, rotting floors, crumbling roofs and much more.
“An inspection is done with the purchase of every single property. It’s kind of a brief one, but it gives us a good idea of what shape the property is in. That information isn’t always translated or shared correctly.”
“When the customer ended up signing the contract and there were liens or the pipes were missing, we could say ‘well we had a recorded phone call with you, I instructed you to go find that out.’ But by nature, we weren’t dealing with the most sophisticated real-estate consumer. So I can say ‘go to the clerk of court, go look up public records’ all day long, but if you don’t know how to do that or if you don’t even know what I’m talking about and you just want to get off the phone with me so you can get into this house, just say yeah all day long.”“If they’re already in a financial situation that puts them in a position to be working with a company like this, they probably can’t afford to throw down several hundred dollars to have an inspector come in and look at all this stuff. Often times when they do, the inspectors are appalled like, ‘no, no don’t buy this!'”