Perfect Offers to Owners Mailer

Jack Butala: Perfect Offers to Owners Mailer. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don't even have to read it. Thanks for listening.

Jack Butala: Jack Butala with Jill DeWit.

Jill DeWit: Howdy.

Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about perfect offers to owners mailer. What makes it perfect? How you do the right one. How you do the wrong one. The whole gamut. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on LandAcademy.com online community. It's free.

Jill DeWit: Okay. D.C. asked, "I just received a delinquent tax notice on a parcel I bought December 21, 2015 and sold January 11, 2016." Nice timing, by the way. Good job. See, by the way, this backs up to my whole look at what happens around the holidays.

Jack Butala: Oh, that's a good point.

Jill DeWit: You can buy things and sell things. Some people think things shut down, but they don't.

Jack Butala: I shut down, that's why.

Jill DeWit: That's why. I do that, too. "The county is telling me that because I was the last owner of record in 2015 I owe all the taxes for 2015 or they will slap a lien on it. I haven't owned the parcel in months and only owned it for just that brief period for 2015. The buyer was from Craigslist and a real challenge to work with, and I have no desire to reach out to him. What should I do?"

Jack Butala: This, actually, the whole thing miffs me a little bit, so can I answer?

Jill DeWit: Sure. "Miffs me ..." I don't know if I've ever heard you use that word. That's good.

Jack Butala: The information that you received, D.C., from the county person is 100% incorrect, not 95%. It's not like in some counties they do it this way and some they don't. None of that business. It's 100% incorrect. These properties, the back taxes travel with the property, all right? What they're getting confused with is prorations in escrow. If you buy at any given time, there's some amount of taxes. If you're going to buy a property at exactly the middle of the year, right, which is what ... 365 divided by two, which doesn't divide, right? There's always one day more for the buyer and one day less for the seller. But that's only prorated if you agree on that with an escrow agent. Let's say you do it the way we do a lot of these deals where you just buy it and you convey the property and that's it. In that case, regardless of the amount of back taxes, it conveys. The new person inherits all the problems or the liens or whatever. Or if there's no taxes at all, the new owner gets that, too. That's why it's so important to really look at this before you buy it.

In this case, specifically, there's a new owner. The Craigslist guy who's a pain in the butt, it's his problem. He didn't pay the taxes is what happened. He did not pay. I'm really surprised that you'd even call the county about it at all. Not you, specifically, but this is a middle finger situation.

Jill DeWit: Yeah. This is a, "Have a nice day."

Jack Butala: This is, "Good luck with that."

Jill DeWit: Right.

Jack Butala: I'm doing some real estate deals over here.

Jill DeWit: And you know what, D.C.? You're not alone. There's times that I've had to politely educate county officials and the key there is politely, you know? You can either, A, do nothing, which is what you should do, but, B, next time you get a call like this, you know, if you want to politely say, "Thank you very much. Actually...," you know, and if you want to inform them, but you are correct. You don't need to worry about that.

Jack Butala: Here's the truth of it. Jill and I talk about it all the time. We've bought and sold thousands and thousands of properties. We get tax bills. We have mountains of paper tax bills that we get, and they get all put into a mail bin. Every once in a while when I'm bored I'll go over there and just look at it and then, probably, just walk away.