We bought this uptown rental with road home liens

We bought this duplex in Uptown New Orleans. The house is in a great part of New Orleans and was a beautiful old shotgun double but the house had definitely seen better days. There was significant termite activity throughout the house. We bought the house during swarming season so you could see piles of wings from the termites all over the floor. The house had been extended at one point and they used 3/4 instead of 4/4 lumber which would not pass a code inspection. While these conditions make it hard to sell the house to a homeowner, for a duplex in uptown there is enough value to be able to sell it to an investor who would rehab it. The owner had been having a lot of trouble selling it because she had a lien against the house from the Road Home Program. This was due to the owner receiving a grant after Katrina to help rebuild the property. The Road Home Program is forgivable if you meet certain criteria like renting it to low income tenants over 10 years. The problem is that it isn’t enough to just meet the criteria, you need to submit paperwork to prove that you have met the criteria over the years. This meant that the owner would need the $80,000 lien to be paid from the proceeds of the sale at closing even thought they had meet most of the requirements. This was making it hard for her to sell as she needed a certain amount of money and the value wasn’t in the house to get $80,000 more than that.

The benefit that Home Buyer Louisiana has in buying a lot of houses is that we have a strong network of professionals to draw on and have seen a lot of these issues before. We therefore got our title attorney to help the owner put together the paperwork she needed to have the loan forgiven and deal with the people from the Road Home Program. For us, our goal is to only ever do a deal where everyone is smiling at the closing table, so the idea of part of that money going to the city instead of the owner isn’t acceptable to us. We always aim to get the most amount of money in the seller’s pockets whenever we do a deal.

If you have a house in Louisiana that you want to sell to a cash buyer then reach out to Home Buyer Louisiana to see if we are a good fit to buy it. We will still buy a house with liens, code violations, back taxes and can buy in As Is condition so you don’t need to make repairs or stage the property.