We Buy Houses With Unreleased Liens

Let’s talk about this house on 7408 Forest in Kansas City Missouri. This one was one of the prettier houses, but it took some work to get it there. The first step was to ACTUALLY buy this house and that took a lot of work and a few months.

The Sellers Of The House

You see a nice elderly lady was living here with her son who was also getting up there in years. She had the 2nd-floor loft for a bedroom and was tired of the stairs. He had one of the small bedrooms on the main floor. The kitchen was tiny with the cabinets falling off the walls. The entire house needed a major overhaul. They just wanted to sell and go rent something and let the landlord take care of the upkeep.

They were the original owners or maybe the 2nd owner. Over the years they had done a lot of work to the home and to pay for this work they took out several home improvement loans. Each of these loans was from small private individuals or companies who had filed these liens against the house. And while these liens had been paid off a very long time ago, no one had taken the time to do the paperwork to have them released.

So while the property was owned free and clear, there were all these liens against the house saying that they needed to be released by the lender before we could buy the house. It is important to note here that we were the 3rd or 4th investor that attempted to buy this house and when the first 2 or 3 came up against these liens, well they gave up and walked away, leaving this home seller very frustrated.

Clouded Title Slows the Process

When we got the news of the lien problem from the title company and called the seller, well the seller’s son actually, he asked “What is my mom to do? We don’t owe anything, we want to sell the house, but because of these liens we are stuck!” He was super frustrated. They really wanted to move, but couldn’t do so until they had the proceeds from selling the house. And it seemed that they just couldn’t sell it.

This was where all the other investor buyers backed out. This is where our amazing team stepped in.

How Our Team Solved the Problem

Our first step was to try to find all of these holders of the liens. We Googled names and companies only to find that some of the parties were deceased and the rest, the companies didn’t exist anymore. So that was a dead end.

Our second step was to talk to the owner of our title company, who was a real estate attorney, and ask what we could do. He said the solution was a Quiet Title Action which basically was some paperwork processed through the court and published for a period of time in newspapers asking the holders of these liens to come forward to be paid or to forever hold their peace. If no one came forward the court would remove the liens, it would “Quiet the Title”, and then the house could be sold.

GREAT! But we hit our next hurdle, this cost time and money. Way back in 2004, this was going to take a couple of months of time and cost about $2,000. But while the seller could wait a couple of months, they didn’t have $2,000.

We had $2,000.

Securing Our Interest to Help the Seller

We then went back to the attorney. While we liked these nice people, we didn’t really want to pay $2,000 to clear up their title problems and then have them back out of the deal. And the sellers wanted to be assured that we would not back out during the time it took for the Quiet Title to be completed. We consulted with the attorney and had him draw up a few legal documents that we all signed that basically assured the seller that we would pay for the Quiet Title and buy their house at the end. At the same time, it assured us that the sellers wouldn’t back out and sell to someone else at the end.

After we were all in agreement, the attorney went to work. He completed the Quiet Title and we paid for it. Then we bought the house. Everyone was happy.

After that, we did a lot of renovations to the home. We only seem to have a few photos left from that time.

Do you have a Kansas City Metro house that you need to sell that has a few issues with its title? Paid off liens and judgments that need to be released. First, ask an attorney about Quiet Title and if you need help, give us a call, we work with some great title companies and know a lot of great attorneys that can get it done. Although it now takes a bit longer and costs more.