Joe Doakes deform Como Park emails:
I didn’t understand my rights or responsibilities under the contract for deed.”
“ Okay, we’ll have the high-volume Contract for Deed Seller give you legal advice.”
Because otherwise where could you possibly find anybody who might know something about buyers rights or responsibilities under legal documents? It’s not like we have 30,000 lawyers in Minnesota, all looking for work. Granted, many of them don’t know as much about real estate as the professional flippers do – but seriously, you’ve put the Seller in the position of being Buyer’s legal advisor and you think that’ll stop fraud? Only a DFLer could make sense of this stupidity.
Maybe the idea isn’t to stop fraud. I suspect it’s much more the plan to just set the flipper up for the ethics claim. Flipper makes a profit (since all flippers make huge profits, none of them ever lose money on these shacks). Government can’t have flippers make profits, since like landlords and other business owners, we know they are rich and need to be punished. So to take the perceived profits from flippers we now impose on them the affirmative duty to be responsible for the buyer in the contract process. that way the claim is set up for the attorneys to pursue. Flipper had an affirmative duty to make sure the buyer got the best deal possible–from the flipper.
Hell, why stop there? Let’s make this the law for car salesmen too. And plumbers. And bankers!!
Joe Doakes
It’s about creating the impression one has “done something”.
The underlying article has some whoppers in it. Or at the very least, writing to cast logical things as somehow nefarious.
“some investors, who have used contract for deed as a way to dump physically troubled properties onto unsuspecting buyers,” How is one an unsuspecting buyer? Or how can a buyer be less suspecting if using contract for deed?
“Some Twin Cities properties have been sold repeatedly by the same seller, sometimes within months of another sale, after an initial buyer defaulted, records show.” So the mortgage holder (contract for deed, seller) isn’t supposed to sell the property again? They just have to hang on to a property they didn’t want? Nothing helps neighborhood values as much as a vacant house.
“other contract-for-deed sellers have marked up their homes by 50 to 100 percent, according to a review of local sales and assessment records.” And? What is the problem with that? Value of something is not dictated by what it costs, but by what someone is willing to pay. And who can say that assessed values accurately reflect market value?