We offer owner financing where we can sell you the home without you having to qualify at a bank. We are the bank and make the final and immediate decision.
We are very flexible with down payment. We can offer you many options and we will always do our best to work with whatever funds you have available. You can even start out with a lease purchase and then move to owner finance at a later date when you have the additional money.
Yes. If you are a bit short on down payment but have strong income, we can set up a monthly payment plan to make payments toward your down payment.
You can get a cash advance on a credit card. You may be able to withdraw or borrow from your 401K to purchase a home without penalties and we'll consider most anything on trade such as cars, boats, RV's trucks, motorcycles jewelry, stocks and bonds.
We can lease you the house with the exclusive right to buy it at a later date. Our buyers love it because it gives them time to save up for a larger down payment, clear up past credit problems or sell another home, and also time to try out the neighborhood before buying.
All we need is your application completely filled out.
If you are buying with owner finance or lease purchase, you can be in the home in less than a week. If you prefer we get you a loan, the average time is 30 days. We can shorten that considerable if you furnish all the documents the loan processor wants quickly.
What if I don't like any houses you have now, but I want you to keep me in mind?
Send me an email with your name, address, phone number, and as much information as you wish about where you want your new home to be and what you want it to be like.
Email me at George@AdvancedRealtyTeam.com, or call 727 734 2042
Articles on How to Rent a Gr8Home in the Current Market
Renting a House Today? How to Check Out Your New Landlord
So You Don’t End Up Out on the Curb!
There was a time when all you needed to care about when you rented a home was location and amenities. Today things just ain’t that simple.
Your landlord could be about to lose the house putting you out on the street or he may not REALLY be the landlord. In either case, the big loser could be you and it is easy to protect yourself.
With a five minute search of a couple of sites on the Internet can give you an awfully good idea of just what is going on. It is free and you do not need to be a Lawyer or a meteorologist to see what way the wind is blowing.
The problem I hear about most when people call me looking for a good place to live is that the Landlord is in foreclosure and he did not tell the folks about that before they gave him first, last and security. Sometimes, he seems to forget to tell them until the Sheriff is knocking on the door with a 24 hours notice to vacate.
In the world of law where foreclosures are spawned like hurricanes off the west coast of Africa nothing happens rapidly. And it is as easy to follow the path of a foreclosure as it is to tune to the weather report to keep an eye on a pending hurricane.
Lis Pendens is the phrase you will see in Florida to indicate that a foreclosure has begun. After than there will be a variety of legal activity showing the progress of the action to kick your Landlord out of the house and you with him. In other parts of the country a Lis Pendens goes by the name Notice of Default. Either means that an action is pending against that particular property.
To start your real estate detective work Google the words tax collector and the name of the county where the home you are considering renting is located.
Tax collector web sites deal with real estate and other property. So once on the site look for real estate search, be prepared to accept the terms of service and once you get to the real estate search section enter the street address of the property in the blank asking for address and click send, or search to find the name of the owner.
In most cases the house will be in the name of a person and will include their address as well, the address where the tax bill is sent. Write down the name and address. You might want to see if the taxes are paid as well. Do not be concerned if the taxes are one to two years delinquent. It is not nearly as bad an indicator as finding the Lis Pendens.
Many veteran real estate investors will not pay their taxes for the last year or sometimes even the last two years. In Florida, if the taxes are not paid, the county will sell the tax certificates to individual investors who will then pay the taxes and collect interest from the property owner when the owner finally pays the taxes.
This used to be a great deal with interest rates of 18 per cent a year and even higher in other states. However, when this great investment became more generally known, an investing army descended on the tax collectors and in their frenzy, they drove down the interest rate on the tax certificates and in many cases not paying your real estate taxes on time is the cheapest money you can borrow.
Of course, it does require knowledge and discipline, but many a savvy investor has unpaid taxes for one or two years in Florida. Other states will vary and if the taxes are not paid by the final dead line you again have the risk of losing a house. We are not advocating not paying taxes for a year or two, but saying do not be unduly alarmed if the house you are looking to rent has taxes that are delinquent for a year or so. Check your local laws.
Of far greater concern is the potential for foreclosure. This is a legal action a lender takes if the person who borrowed the money has pledged a property against the loan and has failed to pay the lender as promised.
While there will be private correspondence between the borrower and lender prior to any legal action (normally) once the lender files his lawsuit in court it becomes a matter of public record. Here is how you find what is happening.
Go to the website of the clerk of court in the county where the property is located and look for the law suits that have been filed in civil court.
Once you are in the clerk’s website look for the listing of civil actions. Then enter the last name and first name of the landlord as they appeared on the website of the tax collector. If nothing comes up, you are probably safe. Check to make sure you spelled the name exactly as it appeared in the tax collector’s website.
If there is a foreclosure action against the landlord you will see the date of Lis Pendens filed and a number of entries after that. Suffice it to say the more stuff entered the closer it is to the day that the sheriff will be knocking on the door. Some of these foreclosures can go on for years, but I suggest you not take that risk.
It is possible that there is no foreclosure against the landlord, but he may be the defendant in some other sort of action. If he is being suit for failure to pay other bills, a foreclosure may not be too far away.
Look for your landlord’s name as a plaintiff. This will let you know if he is business like about filing eviction and law suit to collect money owed.
Some homes in the tax collectors website will be listed as being owned by a trust or corporation and we will tell you how to check them out in the next article in this series.
Renting a House Safely Today? How to Check Out Your New Landlord
So You Don’t End Up Out on the Curb! (Second in a Series)
In the first article in this series we covered how to find out if the owner of the home you are about to rent was in foreclosure and some tricks to use to see if foreclosure might be coming soon, but was not yet filed.
Today we are going to look at what happens if you find out your potential new home is owned by a “person” who is not breathing.
That is not a dead person. If the owner of the house has died recently, the public records you checked based on the previous article will still show the name of the deceased. You are unlikely to see an update in the name until the legalities required following the death are finished.
The non breathing owners you are concerned with here are if your potential palace is owned by a corporation or a trust or a lending institution, think bank.
If it is owned by Chase Bank, Bank of America or any other name that sounds like a bank, it is most likely that the person offering to rent the house to you does not have the right to do so. Banks wind up owning a lot of houses and look to sell them as fast as they can (supposedly), but very unlikely they will rent them while they wait for the sale.
If the house is bank owned, you need to see solid proof that the “Landlord” you are talking to has the authority to rent to you before you put out one cent. Tell then you want proof of ownership to give to your attorney.
Then actually take whatever they give you to an attorney and make sure. It is worth a couple of hundred dollars to make sure your rent payments are actually buying shelter.
If the house is owned by a corporation that does not sound like a bank, go to the web site of the Secretary of State for the state where the house is located and get the name or names of corporate officers and make sure you are dealing with someone authorized by the corporation to rent the house. If you have any doubt, also get this verified by an attorney.
Just as though the house was owned by “Bill Jones” check the corporation name in the civil court records to see if the house in foreclosure or if there are liens or judgments against the corporation or if the company is the defendant in a law suit to collect money.
If the house is owned by a trust, you man not b able to get the name of the actual owners. A name will appear in the records and that is the name of the “trustee.” A trustee is required by law to do what the owner of the “beneficial interest” of the trust directs. So you may deal with the trustee to rent the house. The trustee, in all states that I know about, has the legal authority to keep the name of the beneficial owners secret. So, do not be concerned if you cannot learn who really owns the house. Land trusts are usually used by sophisticated real estate investors, so the “trust” name is not a red flag.
Land trusts, of course, are also used by sophisticated crooks, so by all means do your due diligence. And more about that in the third article in the series. Renting a House Safely Today? In the first article in this series we covered how to find out if the owner of the home you are about to rent was in foreclosure and some tricks to use to see if foreclosure might be coming soon, but was not yet filed. And the differences between humans and legal entities owning the rental property. Today we are going to look at how to get more insight on whoever it is that owns the home we are about to rent. While checking the court records to see if the Lis Pendens has been filed, you will also want to see the other legal actions your landlord has been involved in. As mentioned in Article 2, if he is being sued by a lender for money not repaid, although not involving real property, action against his real property (real estate) may follow. The court records will also show, divorces past and present, the actions he takes to collect money from previous tenants who did not pay and how active he is in legal actions. Good stuff to know. Public records may give you an idea of how many properties he (or she) owns. Lots of properties owned with no or little legal action against her (or him) could well indicate a ship sailing smoothly on what are choppy waters for many others and the likelihood of staying in the house for a long time with little chance of being kicked out because the landlord failed to pay. Easy and cheap way to further your investigation. Google the landlord. You may be amazed at the background information you will get here. Also go to the website of the local newspaper and scan the archives for articles that mention him. Putting his name in quotations will limit the number of entries that are not about her. Putting geographic limiters like the name of your city and state will also limit bad hits. However, try the search with and without geographic filters to see what you find. Eliminating geographic limitations may show previous interests and outside activity for the landlord. Eliminating geography limitations for me will show that I have written a book about renting houses and have written a number of articles on the subject. Reading them might make you decide you would like to be on my VIP Alert List for upcoming houses that we will have available, or that you wanted to look elsewhere. But at least you would be making the decision with added information. This will give you an idea of what else he is up to and somebackground. To keep up to date, as time passes, use “Google alerts.” Once at the Google home page put the word “alert” in the search box. Select the application and enter your email address and the name of the landlord. Put quotes around her/his/its(company) name to reduce the wrong searches you will receive and add a word of local geography. “ ’George Beardsley’ Pasco, Pinellas, Tampa By,” for example. This will send you a report every day on the name of your landlord as new events happen. Some of them will be about him and give you an advance indication of upcoming events. If you find that there are several other persons in the same area with the same name you can use the minus symbol to eliminate repeated reports on the wrong person. In my area there is a famous golfer who is also named George Beardsley. So, if I were checking up on me I would enter “George Beardsley” – golf. That would reduce, but not eliminate, searches that were not me. You can custom the alert after doing a little experimentation when you first check the landlord out on Google. Of course there are more heavy duty ways of doing this, also on the web. There are a number of investigation companies that will perform background investigations for a price, usually starting about $40 and then going way up. I wouldn’t spend the money unless I had found some disturbing information from the free searches of had a feeling that all was not right. Frankly, if the Google search, public records or the local newspaper had items that were disturbing, I would not check further, I would just look for a new landlord. One of the most disturbing things you may suspect is that that person does not own the house they are trying to rent. And we will tell you how to avoid that kind of “landlord” in the next installment. Renting a House Safely Today? Making Sure Your Landlord Really Is Your New Landlord So You Don’t End Up Out on the Curb! (Fourth in a Series) In the first article in this series we covered how to find out if the owner of the home you are about to rent was in foreclosure and some tricks to use to see if foreclosure might be coming soon, but was not yet filed. Then we discussed the differences between humans and legal entities owning the rental property. One of the most disturbing things you may find today is the person who wants you to give them first last and security does not own the house they are trying to rent. In fact some scammer has tried to pull this trick using one of my houses recently. I listed a home for rent at $895 a month, went through the marketing effort outlined in the eBook 911 For Landlords, and had a number of calls from interested persons right away, but no one rented the house in the first few days and I was at the home on the fourth day when someone drove by and seeing a car parked in the drive way turned around and stopped. After a brief look through the house they said they wanted it. Since they told me they had seen the advertisement on Craigslist, I assumed—I know never assume-- they knew the price. I thought they were going to gag when they found out the house was 50 per cent more expensive than they thought. My first impression was they had the address confused and then I got a call from a lady on my VIP Alert List also wanting the house at $600 a month. She had also seen the ad on craigslist and had gotten my email to the VIP Alert List and apparently figured we were having a HUGE sale on this really nice home with a fenced back yard big enough for road races. “You’re the second person to tell me the house is $600 a month,” I said. “It is,” she said. “I am looking at the ad right now.” At that point I pulled Craigslist up on the computer put in the parameters of the address and $600 a month and found an ad with a lot of the features I have in my ads and the email used as the address was my name with a number at one of the major email providers. I called the police because there had been an arrest within the week of someone renting homes he did not own. The lady who called me answered the ad sending an email to the address in the ad. She forwarded tome and I forwarded to the police the response to her email. It was a long rambling letter purportedly from a minister who was currently in Africa and needed to rent the house and would have someone arrange to pick up the rent. How to protect yourself from renting a house like this? First, the usual warning: Anything that looks too good to be true, usually is. While I am and do respect “bargain shoppers,” most things that look too cheap are cheap for a reason. I am not saying forget it if it looks to good to be true, but certainly check it out most carefully. We have already covered how to determine who owns the house. Probably a quick check with the tax collector will tell you the owner’s name. Check the name of the owner and in this market today, I would ask the landlord to see his driver’s license. The legitimate owner may be surprised, but if he owns the house, he is capable of proving it to your satisfaction. If the story is strange, be careful. I am sure there are real ministers in Africa on a mission or in an adjacent town holding a revival that have houses to rent. The name on the tax records should be the same as on the lease and the person offering you the lease to sell should also have identification as to his or her authority to act for the home owner in their absence. As with any other con scheme, if you look savvy and you appear to be intent on checking everything out, it should drive off the con man looking to prey on you. If you have the slightest doubt tell them you want to “close” the contract in your attorney’s office and if you have more doubt than that, look for another house.
How to Check Out Your New Landlord So You Don’t
End Up Out on the Curb! (Third in a Series)