Posted by DaveD (WI) on June 02, 2005 at 08:11:01:
:-p
what would you do? - long - Posted by michaela-ATL
Posted by michaela-ATL on June 02, 2005 at 05:41:17:
I’ve been talking to this oler lady for several weeks. She as a vacant lot, which is part of her grandmother’s estate. I promised her, that I’d help her with doing probate. We agreed upon a price and tuesday she finally came around and I’m getting the lot for 20k.
We went to probate court and it turns out that probate is a lot more complicated than I had expected. This lady ahd 8 siblings, which are all dead. She’s the only 1 alive from 9
children. Some of those dead people have children, which are still alive. Overall a lot of heirs. They’re all in agreement and there’s no problem getting everybody’s signature. BUT, we also have to have probate done for all those dead siblings (actually, for 2 of them probate has been done) to get this finalized.
To top this off, Part of the estate was another house, which has just been tax foreclosed, so there’s a limited amount of time for them to redeem it. They have no money and want to use the proceeds for the lot to redeem the house.
I offered it for sale and had 3 builders fight over it within 30 minutes. The reason I offered it already is that I wanted to use whatever probate attorney the closing attorney would like to work with. That way there wouldn’t be any snafus afterwards and everybody would be on the same page.
Well, that probate attorney thinks, that it would run $ 2500-3500 for this. I could go and shop around, but since it’s really a very complicated estate and we’re under a timecrunch it would probably not be worth it.
Since I’m selling the lot for 30k, so it’s not worth it to me to pay that. I did tell the seller, but gave her the option to also buy the foreclosed house for 45k and then it would be worth it to me to pay for the probate. Or, that I would still buy the lot for 20k, advance the probate cost, but that it would be paid out of the proceeds.
She doesn’t want to do that. She has this complete trust in my and her ability to help her with this without attorney. I honestly don’t think I can do this and I would feel terrible if they lost the house because I did somethng wrong and it took too long.
I woke up this morning with the thought, that I should let the ‘winning’ builder take the lot on assignment for 5k, payable at closing, with the builder paying for probate. Am I being stupid?
I know eventually the probate would be done, even if I did it. And I could say, that I tried as best as I could and that it’s them, that took the risk and lost the house in the process, due to the time crunch. BUT, I don’t feel right about doing that just to make more profit.
What would you do?
Michaela
Never mind - did it! - Posted by michaela-ATL
Posted by michaela-ATL on June 02, 2005 at 07:39:01:
I sent an email to the builder, explaining the situation and offered to change it to an assignment for 5k, to be paid at closing, and they would pay for an attorney.
I’d rather make less money and have a clear conscience.
In the long run things will always come back to you.
Michaela