Article updated January 4, 2020.
When a Company says We Buy Houses with no inspections in Stockton, what does that mean? Does it mean that they will buy your house in spite of what is wrong? If 98% of all buyers order inspections and your house needs a lot of work, it would stand to reason that 100% of the potential buyers for your house are going to want to find out what is wrong with it first, right? It also stands to reason that 98% of those buyers are either going to want some repairs or concessions and maybe both.
My name is Peter Westbrook and we buy houses with no inspections in Stockton, Sacramento and Modesto. We have bought lots of houses and we are not going to ask you to fix a thing. In fact we are going to make you a all cash offer for your house in its current as is condition and we will even buy it subject to the code enforcement and code violations already levied against your house or property. I know, you’re asking yourself what the catch? I am going to tell you to read on, because I dont think there is one. You be the judge.
No matter how you frame the conversation, every real estate problem has solutions and sometimes we just need to get out of our own way to see the opportunity that presents itself. Real opportunities are not always blatant, sometimes they are very subtle and because we are not looking or listening, they pass right by. But real estate in particular, is very sacred ground for most because it is part of that purely American phenomenon known as the American Dream.
Getting a slice is a rite of passage and if something goes wrong, there is a perceived stigma. I am here to tell you that that whole conversation is wrong. The real conversation about the American dream is one of opportunity, risk and reward. It is about seizing opportunity and sometimes failing. I can tell you from first hand experience that no one likes failure, but there is a point where everyone, especially the smart, cut their losses and let someone else have a go at it.
How Home Inspections Can Affect the Sale of a House
Knowing when to give in and look for the next opportunity or as I call it the “exit strategy” takes a special skill called listening. Listening is an acquired skill and sometimes the opportunity is so silent we miss it completely. Those are often times the “golden opportunity” we all look for.
That is the case with the backstory of the video below. Sometimes you just need to alter your thinking and go in a different direction. When I first talked to the homeowners about the Christina house, they had just finished with their fourth bad tenant. The County Code Enforcement and Stockton health department had tagged the property as a health and safety problem because of the damage and the attempted repairs the last tenant had made. In their initial inspection of the house they found several code violations that had existed for years because of other modifications. They found non permitted work that needed correction and were faced with other inspections by code enforcement before they could get approval to rent the house out again.
Mike and Betty had raised their kids in the house and when the kids moved out, Mike and Betty bought another house and kept this one as a rental. It was a good idea at the time. They decided to to do everything themselves including the property management which meant all of the pre-screening and credit checks of all of the tenants, the maintenance of the house and of course the clean up once the old tenants moved out.
Mike and Betty are my age… a bit old school and they took everyone on face value. They knew that their modest family home was neither the prettiest on the block nor the one with all of the updates, but it was clean, everything worked and they raised their kids there. They rented the on a handshake with a lease. They thought that if they impressed upon the tenants the pride in their house, that in return for the rent that the tenants would “take care of the place like it was their own”. The world has changed and some would even say that the tenants did exactly what Mike had asked considering that they never owned a house and didn’t really comprehend the meaning.
But being a landlord takes a special skill set as well. It is also not for the faint of heart or the timid. Tenants can be very good or very bad and the difference can be a matter of a few months. A new boyfriend or girlfriend and a couple of bad decisions, and a great tenant can go sideways. Mike and Betty learned the hard way and after the third tenant with over $7,500.00 in damage to the house, they realized that they were losing money at $700.00 per month. They had become tired landlords and wanted an immediate exit strategy.
Mike, bless his heart did the smart thing. He followed conventional wisdom and called a real estate agent he knew for advise. That’s what everyone that is smart does, right? You have a home and you need to sell you bring in the experts. The agent walked through and later with a contractor, ran the numbers and gave Mike and Betty the bad news. As the house sat, no repairs he valued the house at about $150,000. He then told them that if they invested another $60,000 to fix the house, redo the bathrooms and the Kitchen and clean up the facade, they might be able to get between $195,000 and $205,000. Mike ran the numbers and realized that after he paid commissions and other closing cost he would lose money on the sale of the house and the $60,000 investment had too much risk.
How To Sell A Houses That Needs Work In Stockton
On top of that Mike and Betty saw the stack of disclosures that they would need to sign informing the new buyers of all of the things wrong with the house. Mike was also afraid of inspections that were sure to come. No one buys a flat top roof house without inspections. No one. If 98% of all home buyers want inspections, 100% want an inspection on a flat top roof. The estimated $60,000 spend did not include a new roof and if you know anything about flat tops, aside from being unattractive, they are expensive to replace and repair and no one would certify the roof for potential buyers. It was already 12 years old. The real estate agents recommended course of action was for Mike and Betty to spend more money than they could possibly get out of a sale. That is not an investment.
Mike and Betty recognized they had a problem. They realized that their house was not a perfect fit for a real estate agent because they were not willing to play the spend and wait game. So, while researching different ways to sell his house, Mike ran across one of my We Buy Houses Stockton Articles. He said he spent a lot of time and read several of them that night and took a chance and called me. Mike wanted to sell his house fast but, he needed understand how I might be different. He wanted to understand the process and of course the bottom line and what that meant when it came to his equity.
Mike was also concerned because he knew that before he could sell the house, he needed to fix what was wrong in the eyes of the County’s Code Enforcement and Health Department’s. He got estimates of over $10,000, just for the repairs. When I explained to Mike that I could buy his house “subject to” the code enforcement issues without any lingering liability, he knew he was looking at an exit strategy he liked.
I continued and explained our house buying process.
- It all begins with a text message an email or a phone call.
- I ask questions about the house and its condition.
- I do a visual walk through (I order no inspections whatsoever)
- I prepare a comparative market analysis looking at Fair Market Value
- We discuss
- I make an offer
- We Discuss
- We sign a two page Purchase and Sale Agreement
- We Buy Houses Subject to Code Enforcement
- We Submit to the Title Company
- Seller picks a closing date
The We Buy Houses Company Difference
Most sellers just dont understand that real estate agents see things from a one size fits all perspective. They may know who the cash home buyers in Stockton, Sacramento and Modesto are, but they generally dont refer them as an option of first resort. Real estate agents know that for houses like these, an agent is just another layer of cost and add no value. The truth is that real estate agents don’t buy houses and as a result, they dont think like cash home buyers. They want to list them to make a commission when the house sells and they generally dont care how long that takes.
On the other end of the spectrum is the homeowner and there is a common motivation that they all have… they want to know how they can spend the least amount of money to put the most amount of money back in their pocket. Most homeowners, I’m convinced, if they knew all of their options would not risk thousands of dollars over several months if they thought that they could lose any money. Most would sell for a lesser price if that meant that they would put more in their pocket. The tug of war is fed by two things.
- Real estate agents instinctively dont care about the sales price as it’s a numbers game for them. Selling a house for less or more doesn’t matter the commissions are based on the sales price, but a sale is a sale and cash in the bank.
- For the most part Homeowners dont know that we exist and that we pay fair market value minus the cost of repairs and some holding cost. Without that information they just hear one side of the story and it is not accurate.
Sometimes you just run out of options. You can spend thousands of dollars fixing that house and no matter what you do, the decision to sell my house in Stockton is the best and only solution and now you need to figure out how you are going to do that.
Over the years I have owned a lot of properties. When I first started investing in real estate over ten years ago, it was about recognizing the opportunity and identifying any one of three exit strategies. I live by the rules that I created because they work. If properties went sideways I wasn’t bashful about selling them. Fortunately I didn’t make too many mistakes and because my strategy was embedded in one of three possible exit strategies, I was safe. It was all about the exit strategy.
If you need to sell your Stockton house fast call Peter Westbrook at (209)481-7780
Video Transcription
Hello, my name is Peter Westbrook with Westbrook Real Estate Investments, and of course, you see the signs on the side of the road that say, “We buy houses.” Well, in Stockton, California, if it’s a sign up there, it’s probably mine. My website address is www.ibuyhousesstockton.com. And this video’s to show you how serious I am about that. I’ve done well over a hundred transactions in the Stockton area alone, and this flattop that we bought off of Christina Avenue in Stockton, California, this house is a three-bedroom, one-bath. It’s got a flattop roof and a one car garage.
We’re going to extend the garage out, make it a two-car garage. The other thing that we’re going to do is make it a four-bedroom, two-bath. We’ve got a lot of room to build in the back. It’s a huge lot. When this house is done, it’s going to be beautiful. This house was built in the 1950’s. We run into houses like this all the time, and I love to buy them. If you have a house in any condition, I don’t care whether there’s fire damage, water damage, backed up plumbing, whatever, I buy houses without any inspections whatsoever.
It’s really simple with me. I have a two-page contract, and the contract says, I’m buying the house as is without any contingencies or inspections whatsoever. I don’t care if there are wood pane windows, pulley systems in the windows. I don’t care whether the floors are rotted. I don’t care whether there’s termites. Actually, I do care, but I deal with all those problems. If you have a house that has just become a liability to you, you’re tired of paying the property taxes, the insurance, you’re tired of just having to maintain the property with the city or the county breathing down your neck for code violations, or trying to keep the vagrants and people out of the house, vandalism, the rest of it, if you’re just tired of tenants, give me a call.
My number is 209-481-7780. I’d love to talk to you. Again, my name is Peter Westbrook with Westbrook Real Estate Investments. My company is https://www.ibuyhousesstockton.com. And why don’t you visit my website, give me a call. I’d love to talk to you personally. In fact, the phone number is the same one my mother calls me on, so feel free to give me a call and talk to me about your house. Thanks for watching.