#estates buy

[mostlysignssomeportents]

'We buy ugly houses' is code for 'we steal vulnerable peoples' homes'

Tonight (May 11) at 7PM, I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest, with my novel Red Team Blues; I’ll be hosted by Peter Hemminger at the Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor.

Home ownership is the American dream: not only do you get a place to live, free from the high-handed dictates of a landlord, but you also get an asset that appreciates, building intergenerational wealth while you sleep — literally.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

Of course, you can’t have it both ways. If your house is an asset you use to cover falling wages, rising health care costs, spiraling college tuition and paper-thin support for eldercare, then it can’t be a place you live. It’s gonna be an asset you sell — or at the very least, borrow so heavily against that you are in constant risk of losing it.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: when America turned its back on organized labor as an engine for creating prosperity and embraced property speculation, it set itself on the road to serfdom — a world where the roof over your head is also your piggy bank, destined to be smashed open to cover the rising costs that an organized labor movement would have fought:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Today, we’re hit the end of the road for the post-war (unevenly, racially segregated) shared prosperity that made it seem, briefly, that everyone could get rich by owning a house, living in it, then selling it to everybody else. Now that the game is ending, the winners are cashing in their chips:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

The big con of home ownership is proceeding smartly on schedulee. First, you let the mark win a little, so they go all in on the scam. Then you take it all back. Obama’s tolerance of bank sleze after the Great Financial Crisis kicked off the modern era of corporations and grifters stealing Americans’ out from under them, forging deeds in robosigning mills:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-breaks-down-93-bln-robo-signing-settlement-2013-02-28

The thefts never stopped. Today on Propublica, by Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon bring a horrifying, brilliantly reported account of the rampant, bottomless scams of Homevestors, AKA We Buy Ugly Houses, AKA “the #1 homebuyer in the USA”:

https://www.propublica.org/article/ugly-truth-behind-we-buy-ugly-houses

Homevestors — an army of the hedge fund Bayview Asset Management — claims a public mission: to bail out homeowners sitting on unsellable houses with all-cash deals. The company’s franchisees — 1,150 of them in 48 states — then sprinkle pixie dust and secret sauce on these “ugly houses” and sell them at a profit.

But Propublica’s investigation — which relied on whistleblowers, company veterans, court records and interviews with victims — tells a very different story. The Homevestor they discovered is a predator that steals houses out from under elderly people, disabled people, people struggling with mental illness and other vulnerable people. It’s a company whose agents have a powerful, well-polished playbook that stops family members from halting the transfers the company’s high-pressure salespeople set in motion.

Propublica reveals homeowners with advanced dementia who signed their shaky signatures to transfers that same their homes sold out from under them for a fraction of their market value. They show how Homevestor targets neighborhoods struck by hurricanes, or whose owners are recently divorced, or sick. One whistleblower tells of how the company uses the surveillance advertising industry to locate elderly people who’ve broken a hip: “a 60-day countdown to death — and, possibly, a deal.” The company’s mobile ads are geofenced to target people near hospitals and rehab hospitals, in hopes of finding desperate sellers who need to liquidate homes so that Medicaid will cover their medical expenses.

The sales pitches are relentless. One of Homevestor’s targets was a Texas woman whose father had recently been murdered. As she grieved, they blanketed her in pitches to sell her father’s house until “checking her mail became a traumatic experience.”

Real-estate brokers are bound by strict regulations, but not house flippers like Homevestors. Likewise, salespeople who pitch other high-ticket items, from securities to plane tickets — are required to offer buyers a cooling-off period during which they can reconsider their purchases. By contrast, Homevestors’ franchisees are well-versed in “muddying the title” to houses after the contract is signed, filing paperwork that makes it all but impossible for sellers to withdraw from the sale.

This produces a litany of ghastly horror-stories: homeowners who end up living in their trucks after they were pressured into a lowball sales; sellers who end up dying in hospital beds haunted by the trick that cost them their homes. One woman who struggled with hoarding was tricked into selling her house by false claims that the city would evict her because of her hoarding. A widow was tricked into signing away the deed to her late husband’s house by the lie that she could do so despite not being on the deed. One seller was tricked into signing a document he believed to be a home equity loan application, only to discover he had sold his house at a huge discount on its market value. An Arizona woman was tricked into selling her dead mother’s house through the lie that the house would have to be torn down and the lot redeveloped; the Homevestor franchisee then flipped the house for 5,500% of the sale-price.

The company vigorously denies these claims. They say that most people who do business with Homevestors are happy with the outcome; in support of this claim, they cite internal surveys of their own customers that produce a 96% approval rating.

When confronted with the specifics, the company blamed rogue franchisees. But Propublica obtained training materials and other internal documents that show that the problem is widespread and endemic to Homevestors’ business. Propublica discovered that at least eight franchisees who engaged in conduct the company said it “didn’t tolerate” had been awarded prizes by the company for their business acumen.

Franchisees are on the hook for massive recurring fees and face constant pressure from corporate auditors to close sales. To make those sales, franchisees turn to Homevana’s training materials, which are rife with predatory tactics. One document counsels franchisees that “pain is always a form of motivation.” What kind of pain? Lost jobs, looming foreclosure or a child in need of surgery.

A former franchisee explained how this is put into practice in the field: he encountered a seller who needed to sell quickly so he could join his dying mother who had just entered a hospice 1,400 miles away. The seller didn’t want to sell the house; they wanted to “get to Colorado to see their dying mother.”

These same training materials warn franchisees that they must not deal with sellers who are “subject to a guardianship or has a mental capacity that is diminished to the point that the person does not understand the value of the property,” but Propublica’s investigation discovered “a pattern of disregard” for this rule. For example, there was the 2020 incident in which a 78-year-old Atlanta man sold his house to a Homevestors franchisee for half its sale price. The seller was later shown to be “unable to write a sentence or name the year, season, date or month.”

The company tried to pin the blame for all this on bad eggs among its franchisees. But Propublica found that some of the company’s most egregious offenders were celebrated and tolerated before and after they were convicted of felonies related to their conduct on behalf of the company. For example, Hi-Land Properties is a five-time winner of Homevestors’ National Franchise of the Year prize. The owner was praised by the CEO as “loyal, hardworking franchisee who has well represented our national brand, best practices and values.”

This same franchisee had “filed two dozen breach of contract lawsuits since 2016 and clouded titles on more than 300 properties by recording notices of a sales contract.” Hi-Land “sued an elderly man so incapacitated by illness he couldn’t leave his house.”

Another franchisee, Patriot Holdings, uses the courts aggressively to stop families of vulnerable people from canceling deals their relatives signed. Patriot Holdings’ co-owner, Cory Evans, eventually pleaded guilty to to two felonies, attempted grand theft of real property. He had to drop his lawsuits against buyers, and make restitution.

According to Homevestors’ internal policies, Patriot’s franchise should have been canceled. But Homevestors allowed Patriot to stay in business after Cory Evans took his name off the business, leaving his brothers and other partners to run it. Nominally, Cory Evans was out of the picture, but well after that date, internal Homevestors included Evans in an award it gave to Patriot, commemorating its sales (Homevestors claims this was an error).

Propublica’s reporters sought comment from Homevestors and its franchisees about this story. The company hired “a former FBI spokesperson who specializes in ‘crisis and special situations’ and ‘reputation management’ and funnelled future questions through him.”

Internally, company leadership scrambled to control the news. The company convened a webinar in April with all 1,150 franchisees to lay out its strategy. Company CEO David Hicks explained the company’s plan to “bury” the Propublica article with “‘strategic ad buys on social and web pages’ and ‘SEO content to minimize visibility.’”

https://www.propublica.org/article/homevestors-aims-to-bury-propublica-reporting

Franchisees were warned not to click links to the story because they “might improve its internet search ranking.”

Even as the company sought to “bury” the story and stonewalled Propublica, they cleaned house, instituting new procedures and taking action against franchisees identified in Propublica’s article. “Clouding titles” is now prohibited. Suing sellers for breach of contract is “discouraged.” Deals with seniors “should always involve family, attorneys or other guardians.”

During the webinar, franchisees “pushed back on the changes, claiming they could hurt business.”

If you’ve had experience with hard-sell house-flippers, Propublica wants to know: “If you’ve had experience with a company or buyer promising fast cash for homes, our reporting team wants to hear about it.”

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A Depression-era photo of a dour widow standing in front of a dilapidated cabin. Next to her is Ug, the caveman mascot for Homevestors, smiling and pointing at her. Behind her is a 'We buy ugly houses' sign.

Image: Homevestors https://www.homevestors.com/

Fair use: https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property

[bunnymothmartyr]

"dont put shit on the floor" does the rent we pay every month not include the floor too, mother? When god sings with his creations, will the floor not be a part of the choir?

[theseptembersim]

#ad #eacreatornetwork

Windenburg Castle

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Please note as this is a sponsored post, you will only find this build on The Gallery under my ID above.

[bitchesgetriches]

How common is it to receive money from family members to put towards buying a home? Cause I’ve been talking to various lenders and real estate agents lately and a bunch of them have mentioned I could borrow from family members. I’m not sure if it’s cause I’m maybe a bit younger to be buying my own place so they assume I’m from generational wealth or if it’s cause they think I can’t afford anything and rather than tell me that just say I could borrow from family or maybe it’s just a super common thing to do and I’m out of the loop or a fourth option maybe they all have generational wealth. Idk it’s just an annoying thing to be asked because I would feel out of pocket even suggesting it and they all bring it up like it’s no biggie.

When we were in the process of house shopping 9 years ago, my beloved grandfather lost his battle with lung cancer. I emailed our real estate agent to ask her to cancel the next couple days of showings while my husband and I flew back East for the memorial service. Her response basically boiled down to "Sorry. But let me know if this changes your budget because you'll be inheriting a bunch of money!" If she'd said it to my face I would've punched her.

We did not, in fact, inherit any money from my grandfather. But her callous comment made me think that either

a) inheriting does happen from time to time during house-hunting

b) the only people able to afford their first homes these days are those who get help from older family because the market is currently insane

c) real estate agents want to do anything possible to increase buying costs because they personally benefit from a larger commission.

All of which is to say... I think these agents are being dickheads and you should either ignore them, tell them to stop being assholes, or fire them.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: The Affordable Housing Crisis, Explained 

Season 2, Episode 2: “I'm Not Ready to Buy a House---But How Do I *Get Ready* to Get Ready?”

Did we just help you out? Tip us!

[thegreathomestuckreread]

the worst thing about doing Arts and Crafts is when you have a very specific idea and you do not have the supplies to make it Right Now Immediately

[deitiesofduat]

DEITIES Update – 2023 ➝ 2024 New Year’s Edition

Happy New Year Everyone!

Typically I would write a formal blog post for my end-of-year update, but I'm writing something on the fly for the sake of timeliness ✨

I wish I could say I completed most of what I wanted in the year 2023, as I had several goals I thought were feasible. However, some of those goals had to be placed aside for a very sudden but fortuitous reason, that I feel worth sharing with ya'll -- which is that Iiiiiiii bought my first house! 🥹🥹🥹

(As you can imagine, this took quite a bit of my energy and time this past year, thus explaining part of my absence -- more details regarding my activity under the cut!)

---------------

From early August thru the end of December, my home-searching and closing process was incredibly long, stressful, exhausting, expensive (lmao), and time-inducing. I'm thankful to have had support from my agent, and well as my friends and family while navigating this ordeal, and I'm in the process of moving my items and services into my new home during the remainder of my apartment lease.

This home search combined with my full-time work, was a major reason why took a partial break from social media, and semi-hiatus from new art. This also affected my frequency of updating the DEITIES website and blog -- at least, on the front end. I did a lot of backend work and completed a major to-do with migrating the website and giving it a new primary domain -- so now, both deitiesofduat.com AND deitiesproject.com will redirect to the website. 👍

For the most part though, I used the 2nd half of 2023 to focus on some major life decisions, and leading into early 2024 I’m aiming to give myself a bit of a lifestyle reset. It's going to take some time to settle into this new normal, so aside from occasional media posts I'll continue to be quiet a bit longer. Once I complete some key home-owning goals and attempt to recharge, I'll aim to resume the goals I had in mind for DEITIES Project and my personal art, as well as engaging with my audience more (I miss interacting with ya'll, aha 😭).

In the meantime, thank you all for you continued patience and support! Despite being offline more-than-not this past year, I really appreciate the continue interest you all have in this project. DEITIES remains so important to me even with my shift in scope, so I'll do what I can to put iterate on it and give it all my effort when I have more bandwidth. Until then, wishing you all the very best in 2024!

[hua-liansimp]

OKAY HEAR ME OUT I NEED SOMEONE TO WRITE SHEN JIU AND XUE YANG ROMANCE

[hannibalismos-jaaneman]

sometimes i think about what would have happened if richard had died instead of henry and the rest of the book had been narrated the song of achilles style and it hurts

[spookysims4]

Dunesti castle

[bambbbbbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii]

Went to the sickest garage sale today and got some loot.. can’t wait to start making some things w all these goodies

@bambbiiii on Depop

@baammbbiiiiii on Insta

[isa-ah]

been following you since PRE bubblegum karkat days and it’s been really nice watching you grow and heal and whenever i see you on my dash and think of your growth it reminds me of my own healing journey. i find that really nice

HAHA that was AGES ago dude. my god. i cant believe youre still around, that was like, the worst of it LOLOL weve both probably come a looong way since then, yeah. life used to be abysmal but now ive got my hubby and mother in law and were moving to nola next month so theres nothing to fear =')

[devouringyourson]

always laughed at boomers with their candy crush addiction and never had games on my phone but then a friend reccomend monopoly go and its like crack to me we even have a loser gc where we exchange monopoly cards and do challenges together. i barely speak to these people irl but we have an active trade for our silly little capitalist pig game what on earth

[todayisafridaynight]

Mine is not SUBTLE. He probably wears rainbow underwear that says I love Daigo Dojima written on them. Like I identified his character in Ishin purely based of off the gay vibes he was giving me. Mine is the gay disaster rep we deserve.

mine's a distinguished homosexual who relatively functions like a semi-normal human being until the second daigo takes a nap for two weeks THEN he's a category 4 disaster

[burstingsunrise]

I just think that luke's shoulder (specifically this bit of skin)

meghna whether you realize this or not you have tapped into one of my extremely specific luke-based obsessions.

this particular area where chest meets shoulder meets armpit. meg and i have trademarked it "the spot." it calls to me. so smooth and alluring. a lovely place to rest your head.

and it's interesting because most people don't have it. it's this extra bit that connects Luke's chest to his arm because his shoulders are so fucking wide. like look at this comparison of cake in the same shirt. you can see this spot on luke but it simply does not exist on calum.

and some more spot content because i can't help myself...

asdf help

[bitchesgetriches]

Hi, I'm staring down the idea of owning my own house. Do you have any advice about purchasing a house/townhouse/condo whatever? It will be my first owned property and mortgage. I've never taken out a major loan before.

Congrats, kitten! This is an exciting step.

I highly recommend this episode of our podcast, which is specifically geared towards the resources you need when getting ready to buy your first home:

Season 2, Episode 2: “I'm Not Ready to Buy a House---But How Do I *Get Ready* to Get Ready?” 

Did we just help you out? Tip us!

[dirty-bear-rick-sanchez]

Also I rewatched the other Inside Job Part 2 trailer and ‘this is the most damaging midlife crisis since Elon Musk’ has aged like the FINEST of wines