OK, you’re not my lawyer, but I’m hoping someone will be able to let me know if this situation is suspicious or business-as-usual.
My daughter’s grandparents died several years ago, leaving their property (a trailer on an acre of land) to their kids. Some guy, apparently a real estate agent, is trying to buy the property from the heirs so he can flip it. The property has a bunch of code violations that almost eat up the value of the land, and the trailer has water damage and needs to be torn down.
All of the heirs will receive about $100 from this sale. The guy wants all of them to sign legal papers so he can proceed with the sale. There are 14 heirs, some the grandchildren whose parents are dead. My daughters father died a couple of years ago which is why she stands to inherit this $100.
They are pushing her to sign papers and overnight them back today or the deal might not go through. She had them email the papers to me to look over. My main concern was that she not somehow become liable for her father’s or grandparents’ debts.
The papers seem to be OK, except for one which stated that her father was never married to me (true) and that he never acknowledged paternity (not true, he signed her birth cert and she has his last name.
I emailed the attorney back and asked that that line be changed. The paralegal replied to me that the only page that needs to be accurate is the signature page and the lawyer would change it after it was received, signed, which needed to happen NOW NOW NOW or else.
Now, I could care less about the $100 she is supposed to get. I’ll give her a hundred bucks if this deal doesn’t go through. But really, you’re supposed to just sign an incorrect document with a perjury warning on it? A lawyer can change a document after you sign it? Is this at all correct? This real estate guy has emailed me six times this weekend trying to get me to have her just sign. I’ve seen enough People’s Court to know that you’re supposed to read before signing, and if you sign something and it turns out to be detrimental to you then you’re fucked.
In my meager experience with lawyers and signing documents with perjury warnings on it, the lawyers always ask you to make sure the document is correct. This sounds like something fishy is going on. Getting a lawyer for a $100 is hardly going to be worth it but onthe other hand why the rush on a $1400 deal? Is there any chance the value of the property might go up because of some other development nearby?
ysh, sounds like something fishy. IANAL but I’d have someone look into this. Your potential downside: loss of $100 sounds very meager compared to the potential upside: property appreciates in value markedly due to road/mall/other development.
Are there any mineral rights associated with the property?
The buyer must not be very bright (or must think the heirs are pretty dumb) if he thinks that the threat of losing out on $100 is enough to get people to rush into a real estate transaction. I wouldn’t be in that much of a rush to cash a $100 check that was laying around.
I told the lawyer she wasn’t signing it unless it was correct and their hurry wasn’t our problem. They emailed me the corrected form within minutes.
The real estate guy sent me the tax info; the property is valued at $30,000. There are over $7000 owing in back taxes. I was wrong, it isn’t a trailer, it’s a house in a neighborhood a few miles from the beach in Nassau County, FL. I looked for it on Google maps and there’s no house there. Maybe torn down already? The picture was from 2012.
Missed edit:
My main problem is with the idea that you can sign a document and a lawyer can just change it afterward. What’s the use of signing anything then?
Definitely keep a copy of what she signs, just in case a different version is presented later. This attorney being willing to alter documents post-signature worries me.
Good for you for making sure your daughter didn’t sign inaccurate documents, but something still doesn’t seem perfectly kosher here. Granted, the financial stakes aren’t terribly high, but still.
Is there a concensus among the other heirs to sell the property, or is the would-be buyer pressuring each of them this way individually?
Are you in contact with any of these folks? At the very least, I’d talk to a few of them. “Say, George, does this real estate guy seem on the up and up to you? Do you think now is the right time to sell?” and so forth.
She’s the last one; all the other kids signed already. I think she may be holding the whole deal up. I got some more info from this real estate guy. What she gets is one-fourteenth of one-half of the estate. For some reason the grandfather quitclaimed his half of the house to his daughter, who actually predeceased them. So her two kids are splitting his half, and all 14 are splitting the other half.
The real estate guy is agitated because he’s apparently put a lot of his own money into the deal. I’m assuming he made the deal to buy the house from the cousins with the half-interest, and the rest of them are mainly obstacles. Each of the 14 will get between $100-$500, I guess depending on how much all the penalties for the code violations are. So really she’s getting what it’s worth.
Assuming he (the real estate speculator) is not lying, it was kind of stupid to admit he’s already sunk a bunch of his own money into the deal. If it’s worth so much to him then he should be a big boy and pay up. Your daughter now knows she has room to negotiate for more money. Ask for a few thousand and see what he does. Worst case, she’s out a piddling hundred bucks.
That’s my take on it, too - I don’t put my signature on documents that I know are inaccurate (I’ve had to hold things up to get my name corrected umpteen times, but legal documents are legal documents).
I do wonder about the guy buying it, too - I have no sympathy for him that this is takign a while, and he has money tied up in it - you buy a property from 14 or whatever people, and if you don’t know it will take a while, you don’t know much.
Unless there is some urgent need to dispose of the property (i.e. some impending expensive liability), I’d just walk away from the deal.
What possible good reason could there be for someone trying to hustle a quick signature?
OK, there are probably a few valid good reasons why that could occur, but they are massively outnumbered by the possible bad or malicious reasons for the hurry.
And seriously? “Sign this right now, and I’ll change it later”. Um, no - that alone would make me tell him to fuck right off.
TheChileanBlob, I don’t mean to ask an insulting question but do you or your daughter know the difference between a property’s assessed value for tax purposes and it’s market value?
For instance, I own a little 1 bedroom rental - The assessed value is $6,670 but the property is worth about $85,000. Did someone actually convince you the property is worth $30,000 or were you shown the assessed value?
Also, even given a property worth $30,000 with $7,000 in delinquent taxes, why would your daughter sell 1/28th of it for $100?
Honestly, I really don’t know much about it. No, you’re right, that was the assessed value. Presumably this guy is going to make some kind of profit selling it to somebody else. Neither I nor my daughter have ever seen this place; we don’t even live in the same state.
Well I’m on my way out the door so maybe somebody else will explain it, but the assessed value by itself doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the market value of the property. You can convert it using that county’s common level ratio, but even that’s not the same as a real appraisal.
It’s not a question of the purchaser making a fair profit. Take my rental as an example. The $6000 doesn’t mean anything by itself. If I sold it for $6000 I’d be giving up almost $80,000.
Sure, I understand that. The property is worth what someone will pay for it, which is likely more than the assessed value.
It seems like these papers she’s supposed to sign are to prove her identity as an heir of her father’s estate (which is 1/14 of 1/2), which will get her the deed, which she then is supposed to sign over to this guy. As far as them selling the property, if they each own 1/28 (except the two that own the other half) none of them can live there or sell to someone else without the others’ consent. None of them are in any position to buy out the others, and with five years of back taxes owing it’s likely to be sold on the courthouse steps. I suppose the ones who own the majority are the ones negotiating with this guy.
IME, any time someone wants you to sign something “NOW NOW NOW” there’s something going on. Some information they don’t want you to have time to find out or think over.
There are exceptions though. If you’re in the ER with a burst appendix I’d recommend signing the consent to treat ASAP.
In this instance, time to start digging and turning over rocks.
If someone says that you have to sign “NOW NOW NOW” then you frown, glance at the paperwork, and say the magic words “I’ll have to run this past my lawyer”. Of course, the frown and glance can’t be done on the phone, but the words alone are usually enough to get the other person to start sweetening the deal, if you’ll just sign now. Or the other person will claim that the offer is only good if you sign now.
Every time I’ve had someone pressure me to sign a form (that’s not an emergency situation on my part), it’s always turned out that they were trying to scam me in some way. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked away from “deals”, with assurances that I’d regret not signing, only to hear about the scam in the news later on.
