Tales From The Note Crypt - Scary Note Case Studies

Foreign.

This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for panties on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now here's your host CEO of We Close Nodes, Scott Carson.

Oh my ghouls and goblins, welcome to Note Night in America. Tales from the Note Crit. Ah, we're glad to have you this Halloween. Then try not to be too scared from the different tales that we'll be sharing. If you dare be a note investor. Yes, we have done these quite often. This is your first night on Note Night in America. Do not be scared. We here on your new side providing the greatest of information for your note in real estate investing. So as not to scare you.

We'Ve.

Been delivering these since 2011 and this is the 11th year coming. The 12th year. In the first of the year, make sure you subscribe to the Note 19America podcast. All videos are on YouTube. Make sure you subscribe there at WeClosenotes TV. Also make sure to check out the other podcasts on all podcasting platforms, the Note Closer show podcast with 700 ghoulish episodes and of course, our Note Camp live podcast with fresh content and a scary sampling of the experts out there. But tonight, tales from the Note crypt. We're honored to have you here tonight as we share four different tales of Note Investor Scared on deals. Scared deals that will scare you, entice you and entertain you. All right.

All right, everybody. I can't do that voice from a walkway horse, but can you tell we like to have a little. Fine, why not? Happy Halloween everybody. Welcome to no Night in America. Got some tales here that I think will entertain you definitely. If not make you think, and if not, keep you up at night thinking about these. Several of these deals I still think about on a regular basis. Okay, so the first Hoarder House of Horrors is we're going to share this first story is a Hoarder House of Horrors. That was actually my first ever. I won't say deal because I didn't close on it, but it was the first property that I was invited to talk, was the first person that responded to a letter campaign of mine back going back to 2004. 2004, I believe. 2005 and it turned into a hoarder house. And I'll tell you what, I get a phone call one Sunday night about.

6 o', clock, I get a phone call and it says Walmart payphone.

Okay? That's the first sign that something's wrong. Okay? Says Walmart payphone. I'm like, what the heck is this? It shows up on my, it rings on my house phone, which at that time was a vonage line. So anybody rang in a house phone, it was either telemarketer or somebody responded to a letter campaign. So I picked up the phone and I'm like, hello, is this Scott Carson? I'm like, yes, it is. I said, I need you to come by my house. I got your letter, I need you to help me. I'm like, okay, sure. Can you give me your, your address? So she gave me her address. 207 Silk Cove. I was like, oh, is that Leander's? Like, yes. And I'm like, okay, great. You need to, well, you got to come by the house. When you come by the house, knock on the door and then go stand by the garage and I'll come to get you. You hear my dog's barking, but go stand by the garage, open the garage, I'll let you in that way it's like, okay, that's not unheard of, you know, maybe they need to put their dogs away. So I immediately get off the phone, I get her address, you know the number she gave account but was a pay phone. I was like, well, it's not gonna be very good to call her back. But she said, come on over about 6 o' clock at night. I'm like, okay, great. So what I do, I jump online, I type in the address and it pops up this house in the area. I'm like, oh, that's a nice looking house. It's on the end of a cul de sac. I can see the aerial view. It's got a big backyard, huge. This is a KB home, coppin Brody box home. So it's basically like 3,000 square foot, two story house, you know, three bedroom or four bedroom. Two, two bath is three bath actually. And the two guards like, oh, it's not bad. Great. I got pretty excited about it, saw the values. I was looking at the neighborhoods, like, oh, that's pretty cool. So I go over there, I go knock on the door and I hear dogs bark. And I think it sounds like three or four big dogs. Like, oh, that might not be a good thing. And I go stand by the garage. Well, there's no mobile, there's no caravan there, there's no car parked. It's a little cold outside, a little bit of ice. And the garage door opens to Hell, Okay. It literally this, like. I want to say it's like a cloud came out, but it wasn't a cloud of smoke or dust. It was like a cloud of putrid stench. Okay? And I'm standing in the middle of the thing. It's open up. And I see a car in there by the wheels. And I see this lady walking up next to call. But the rest of the garage is still black plastic garbage bags. And I see the walls. Three sides of the wall are bookshelves with all those penny romance novels, paperback. I'm like, okay, this interesting. And it gets up and I see, you know, the garage door gets about halfway and there's a lady standing there who's about 3 foot wide by about 4 foot tall. And this wave hits me. A smell of piss and shit. Okay. Dog crap. I'm like, oh, I can see dog crap in the garage. Like, okay. All right. And the ladies. Are you Scott? I'm like, yes, ma', am. I am. She's. My name's Susan with a Z. I'm like, okay. And she said that. Susan with a Z. She's. We talked for a little bit and I said, well, for me to get an idea of what to be able to help your house, have you stay in your house or work or something, I got to be able to see the inside. She's like, okay. So she turned around and walked in. Well, she was wearing these, like, khaki elastic pants that were split down the middle. Thank God she was wearing clean underwear because her bloomers were hanging out. Okay, so we go in. She opens the door. It stinks. We go past the half bathroom and we go into the living room. And I am just amazed. There are piles of clothes and trash everywhere. There's like three couches. They're all covered with clothes. And I see these four big dogs lumbering up. Two Jumer and shepherds and a lab and a mixed munch. Like, oh, they're good. They're my babies. I'm like, okay. And I walk around the house a little bit there on the first floor. And I can see the kitchen. It's nice. Cabinets, nice. What I thought was granite countertops, but it was. I could hardly see the granite countertops because there was just trash. Dirty dishes, dirty dishes in the sink, garbage bags everywhere. And I'm like, why is my feet squishing in the carpet? And I look and I'm seeing all this dog excrement on the ground. And I'm wondering. I'm looking at the sheetrock in the walls. And the bottom two feet, two and a half feet, are yellow. As it fades to the white, I'm like, oh, my God. And I see her when her dogs go over, lift his leg in, pee in the house. She doesn't do anything to stop it there. And I'm like, oh, I'm. I'm squishing in cat. I mean, dog pits. Oh, it's. I'm just starting to get creeped out. There's flies in the house. I'm like, okay. So I. She takes this big lump of clothes and moves it over so I can sit down next to her. And she's sitting down on a chair to my left. And these dogs come up and they're jumping up on her. They're trying. They're licking her in the face. After I see them playing, I'm just like. I'm like, they're coming to me. I'm like, oh, no. She's like, are you. Oh, you guys. I'm not a dog person. Well, I am a dog person. I just don't want to have these dogs look on me and all that stuff. So it's just disgusting. So we're talking for a few minutes. I tell her, well, we could try to do a short sale. We could try to do momma. Well, I've owned all these houses. And she told me her story that she owned three houses, had roommates and the drugs, and she was driving. Expired license. She could arrest like 12 times. And I'm like, well, there's not much I can do without looking at the rest of the house. So we get up and I have my camera and I start taking photos. And she does not want to let me go in the bathrooms. And I'm. There's a reason why. No, there's no dead body. There might as well been. Because she proceeds to tell me that water has been off at the house for four months. No water at the house. So what are you thinking? It's probably the same thing when I was thinking, how the heck did she go to the bathroom? I'm looking outside, there's this big backyard, wide open. Why isn't she letting the dogs go outside? And she doesn't want to let the dogs out because the neighbors supposedly knocked the hole down. It's just everybody else's fault versus her for some reason. So I was like, okay. So we opened the first bathroom downstairs, and I almost. I dry even my mouth, almost vomit. Because she had still been using the toilets, the toilets got full. That she would close the toilets and then start crapping Defecating in these five gallon hunger buckets. And each bathroom was like that. Don't think about it. Today I go to her master bedroom, just full of shit. Her bed was half covered with to go boxes, Styrofoam to go boxes, and where she was sleeping at night. And I'm like, okay. So I took a lot of photos. I'll try the best way to do a cold. World Savings tried to negotiate a short sale. I sent them photos. I wish they'd been scratching sniff photos because it would have done some good. But they wouldn't budge. They wouldn't budge. They wouldn't budge. This is prior to 2007. So it wasn't. It was right before everything happened. And I tried for six months and she would call me occasionally from the Walmart pay phone and I would say, give her an update, try to come up with a thing. Finally, nothing happens. Well, six months goes by more six months and I get a phone call from World Savings. So they're trying to track down an Eric Davis or something like that. And I'm like, eric Davis on What property? Like 207 Silk Cove. I'm like, oh, my God, yes, I know that property. What happened? Well, the bar is deceased. I'm like, what? So I get online to look, and she had eventually died in the house, died in her sleep. And nobody checked on her for over a week so that the dogs began to nibble on her. When the guy bought it. I actually called him when he. The guy bought it. They had to. They had. Obviously you had the body pulled out of there. Took the dogs to the pound and put them down. And then he stripped the entire house down to the studs because it stuck so bad. And Sheetrock was rotted and had to take a hazmat crew through the thing to clean it up. Now he sold it like six months later. But that was my first ever indoctrination into the world of distressed real estate. And I can remember driving home from my appointment and calling my wife, who's married to the time I said, hey, open up the garage, put the water hose, put some dawn or soap in there and give me some fresh clothes and a towel. Because I went in there, I stripped down, I threw my shoes away, I threw all my clothes away because I didn't want anything. And I just, I just like, luckily had a towel in my truck at the time. So I put the towel down before I sat down because I didn't know what I was sitting on. It's just disgusting. Now, why would you get into real estate. Well, the legendary Ronald grand would say the smell of and piss is the smell of money. I spent a lot of money, but that was a house of horrors. I guess you could say if you walk into something like that the first time around and you don't run screaming, that's that. This was a, like I said, nasty. And then the borrower died and yeah, not, not a good story. Anyway, moving on. This is what the house looks like today. I'm tempted, I wonder if the borrower knows or the owner knows of what happened that house before. But it was a beauty. I mean it could be a really nice house and nice neighborhoods. Probably worth 500, $600,000 now when it was worth 250, 230 back in the day. So let's move on to the next.

Tale from the no crypt.

This is the skeleton in the closet house. So when you're a note investor, you don't get to see inside. And oftentimes when you're buying portfolios, you take everything that's included with a portfolio. And I, back a few years ago, I was behind a portfolio of houses, most of them being Ohio. And I do. One of the things we look at is like, okay, what's the property look like? Like very many of you would look at, right? Well, we looked at it and it doesn't look this, it didn't look this good. But the picture was a few years old and it was overcrowded. This is what the house looks like today. Okay. It's really nice looking house. Right then it didn't have the landscaping that's tall grass, weeds, windows busted out. I said, so we had to take it. So it was in Dayton, Ohio. Okay, this is one of like 40, 50 houses at the same time. And we knew it was, it said owner occupied. But the guy hadn't made a payment in two years. And when we looked at the servicing notes, we see that they hadn't got a hold of anybody. So what did we do when we immediately bought the portfolio? We sent a realtor out to go find it. Well, she sent her son out at first and found the guy walked into, I guess he was a teenage kid. Walked in and found a mummified body in the closet of the house. What had happened? The guy had hung himself in the closet like two years earlier. A 53 year old Edward Brunton's tissue had dried up and was preserved in the home's cold and dark conditions. And the guy was homeless before inheriting money from his mother to buy the house. In 2009 and probably died soon after that. We bought this in, like, 2013 to that late 2014 or. No, it was actually 2000. Sorry, early 2014. But, you know, it was just a. Oh, I mean, when he walked in, supposedly that the guy's body was in two pieces. You get the skeptical. The skull and then the rest of the body. And the skull had rolled to the middle of the room, but he'd hung himself in his closet. And he's still wearing his clothes. And so we call that the skeleton of the house. Now what do you do? Well, we called the cops. They came in, pulled the guy's body out. We took it to foreclosure and priced it low to sell at the foreclosure auction. And somebody bought it for basically what we paid for it. So they bought it. And when you're buying the foreclosure, you're buying as is. Where is. You know, I mean, it's buyer beware, not seller beware. So they took it and obviously cleaned it up. And maybe they didn't do the research, but yeah, that was the skeleton in the closet out that. I think that the young guy never wanted to be in real estate after that. It's according to his mom, that one Just, you know, you think you're walking in. I mean, we see some like, I saw a dead. Dead animal this weekend looking at a house. Dead cat. I've seen dead dogs. I've seen bums, homeless people in the house, Drug addicts, You know, stuff like that. Walked in on two bums having sex one time in Pittsburgh with a minister. What really scares you is a note that I did not buy that I came across. I'm glad I didn't. We call this the story of the sicario house. Okay. He's watched the movie Sicario back in 2018. They talk about how the Mexican cartel found a loophole in our banking system. Have they started buying real estate in Florida, Phoenix, Arizona and other parts of Arizona. They found a cash buyer in Mexico. And then what they did is they put lines of credit against the houses. And so when the. The cartel would go around collect money, or the drug dealers go around and collect money, they would go in and pay down the lines of credit at 9900 bucks a pop. If you watch the movie that lines this all specifically. Well, one of the things that we always search for is always search an address on the house and look for news and media. Well, we typed in an address and we found the story of the sicaria house. What one Sicario had done, one cartel had done is that when they would kill somebody, instead of leaving the body there, they would wrap the body in plastic and then go and place the bodies in the wall. A movie is based on a true story. When it comes to this true story, they were wrapping and putting dead people in the walls. And they had one guy that would sit there and watch the house, keep the yard looking nice on the outside, but just there was their dead house. Finally, they were raided and we saw this property on a note tape that the government was auctioning off. We wondered why. We did some research and this is what we found. Yeah, no, we'll do without the dead body house. We call it the Sicario house. The house we did not buy. The house of a thousand corpses is a better way to look at it because supposedly they found bodies in the walls in the attic, buried under the ground. It was. It's a very, very bad, bad thing that'll keep you up at night. Imagine that with you buying a house, there being 20 bodies in the wall around your bed. Talk about ghoulish goblins and ghosts in that house. All right, and our last story here, we call this the Corsicana Ghost House. And this is a recent occurrence just yesterday. True story. Now, one of the things that we get is we often get lists and tapes of reverse mortgages where a bank has bought a portfolio, reverse mortgages, now they're looking to sell the asset off. Now what a reverse mortgage is, it's basically an annuity where somebody who's 62 or older, both borrowers, if they live in a house with a lot of equity, they can often get a reverse mortgage or they don't have to pay in their mortgage. It's not credit based. It's all based on the equity in the value of the house where they can often be paid money monthly as like an annuity. And then when they pass away or die, the heirs are responsible for then either paying off the loan or paying off the bank and taking the property back. Well, a lot of these borrowers don't have the money because the houses are often in disrepair because it's elderly people that don't pay to upkeep the property on cases. And we got a list in this house in Corsicana and it's. That's the street view and that's not a bad looking. I just realized something though. You looking at. Do you see something in the window? Look at that. There's like a ghost in the window. And there's nobody that's lived in this house for years. Okay. It's a four bedroom, three bath. This is taken off of Google. You don't even see the Google image. But look at that. There's literally like somebody in the window there. I just recognize that. And you see it's boarded up. Well, I was supposed to drive up and look at this house on Saturday. Didn't feel good. And I. One of my students who's looking at this deal as well, out of Dallas, he drove her, take a look with his wife. First house he's walking into. Okay. So he walks through the house and he says it's. It's literally, it's not in bad shape. It's got a little foundation issue in one spot. But it looks like somebody came through, grabbed valuables, and they left. They just left a bunch of stuff all over the place. So he took a bunch of photos of mattresses. And, you know, there's living stuff and couches and clothes, but not trash. The copper still there, the boiler or the water heaters there, the air conditioner still there. And as he was taking his photos in the house, he felt the wind run against him. And his wife both felt this wind when there was no wind, no open door, no window open. And they suddenly got a chill, Very eerie feeling as the temperature dropped right around him. And they're like, this feels strange. It feels like somebody's watching. So I took a few photos. Let's get the heck out of dodge. Well, when they were looking at the photos on the way back, this is one of the photos. And if you look in the photo here, you drew a circle around it. You see lights coming in on one side coming from this window. But do you see it? Do you see the outline of the ghost? And you see his shoulder there? His head would be a shoulder, like he's coming out of the wall, his leg. Isn't that eerie? Because the borrow. When I reached out and did some search, the borrower passed away in this house, Maybe this room, I don't know. But there is a picture. The shadow ghost, the shadow person in this house. Now what will we do this house? Well, first thing I do, if I'm buying a house and I find that somebody has passed away in it, we sage the heck out of it. I go get some holy water. I say a blessing. We put some crosses up around the house, and we just. We pray for the spirit to find his resting place and move on and sage it and go from there. I don't like to move into it now, since I'm buying The note do I have to legally disclose if I sell the property at the auction, somebody buys it? No, I do not. If I know if something is going on, yes, I disclose it. But there you go. There is witness of the shadow person. I have to thank Scott Meredith for providing this. And he called me like, dude, we.

Just saw a ghost. We just saw a ghost.

And so I, I kind of chuckled like, okay, let me see. When I saw it. You can see very clearly the, the outline of, of the house of the person there. And I know, I'm sorry guys, I did not leave chat open. I'm going to open chat up now for if you guys have any questions to put it in the chat roll. I just realized I got, I got taken away with it being scary tales of the crypt. But there you go, guys, four tales. We have seen amazing stories. We've seen some crazy stuff. The idea here guys, is to not let that stop you from making offers. Yes, if you're buying reverse mortgage notes, more than very likely that somebody has passed away in the house. And you, you buy in bulk. You may wherever I'll buy a deal where somebody has died in the house. You never know what's available for out there. But I want to thank you guys for listening in tails. If there are any questions or comments for me, guys, hopefully you found this interesting. A little fun thing to do here on Halloween 2022. Now my voice is hoarse for a couple days from doing this, but any questions, comments, concerns from you before we let you go. Anybody had a story they like to share about a ghost house or a house they bought that had something ghoulish, scary or distressing on the inside? Nope. All right then everybody. Well, hey, have you a very safe and happy Halloween. Be safe out there. Don't be scared if you got a deal that has something in. Hey, let the let the bank know what the bar not give me a phone call. We'd love to hear but have a safe Happy Halloween. Thank you guys. And we'll be back next week for the next note night in America.