Is The Doc Fee Refundable When A Buyer Ghost The Process?

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek. Your favorite niche real estate website, thelandgeek.com and land geek Nation.

We've got all the usual suspects on this week's roundtable. It's a treat. We've got the Zen master. Breathe in the mailing, Breathe out the marketing.

Mike Zano. How are you?

I'm doing wonderful, thank you.

Good to see you wearing my favorite Land Geek shirt. We've got dude Buddy, the nightcap OG Showing his grit.

Scott Bossman. How are you?

Great, Mark, how are you?

Good to see you.

You've got Eric the Technician Peterson all.

The way in beautiful Franklin, Tennessee, playing the dueling banjos. Eric, how are you?

I'm great. Happy to be here.

Good to see you.

We've got Terea putting in the reps. Harris Trea. How are things?

Going well. Happy to be here.

So good to see you. So happy you're here.

And I love it when you call me Big Papa.

Tate.

Litchfield.

Tate. How are things?

I'm doing really well, thanks. Things are good.

Good to see you. And last but not least, the brain, the professor, the flight school Sherpa.

Scott Todd. Scott Todd.netLandmodo.com, learn anything about anything. Investor Ninjas.com Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm great. I'm great. We've got an incredible topic for this week's roundtable, and Mike Zaino. Just let us know what this is.

Yeah. What do you do with the doc fee, Ghost? So this is when someone pays the doc fee and then they go radio silent.

Right.

You can't get in touch with them. How long before you. There's three hours here. How long is it reserved before you refund? If you do refund and relist it.

Okay, so I see your ad on Land Moto, I go ahead and I put money down on the property. Now I put my down payment and the dock fee.

I'll just go the doc fee for now. You can do both if you want. I was thinking the doc fee, but you can do either one.

Okay, so what's your dock fee?

Right now? $199,000.

So, yeah, but $199,000 down now, I. I've. It's. It's on the ad.

How long that it's. I'm going to be able to hold.

This property or it's just negotiated?

Yeah, I don't even put that in the ad. How long?

It's.

I don't know. That's a Good question. If anybody puts it in their ad, I'd like to hear about that too.

Okay, this is a phenomenal topic. And of course, because it's your topic, Mike, we've got to start with Dude.

Buddy the Nightcap OG Scott Bossman.

Well, let's see. We do not advertise any type of reservation period with the doc fee. Typically when they pay, I would say it's very rare that this happens, although it has happened in the past. So typically you're, you're on to a conversation about, okay, here's how we're going to make this happen. Let's do it. Every once in a while this may happen. So, you know, I give them a couple days maybe and if, if they're not moving forward with me and we have all these leads coming in because I think we've all been in situations like this where maybe somebody doesn't talk to us for a couple of days and we've got leads coming in, leads coming in and we're saying sales pending, sale is pending. Comes 48 hours. I'm getting, I'm getting a little bit antsy that, that I may have other great leads in the queue here to buy this property that someone has reserved. So I just may send them an email and be, you know, point blank with them or a text or a voicemail and say, you know, listen, if you don't want the property, please let me know because I have other people in the queue and if I don't get an answer, I don't know if I'd refund them or not honestly, unless they said something to me, but I think I'd refund them. Mark, look at him. It says non refundable doc fee on our website.

So it does, absolutely.

So I guess that's the approach I would take.

I have some really strong feelings about this topic, but I'm going to reserve my sentiments.

Eric the technician Peterson, what are your thoughts?

So on most occasions this doesn't really come up. I think that our process is we collect the down payment and doc fee all at once and we initiate the contracts from there. As soon as we've created the contracts that doc fee becomes non refundable. So if they change their mind before signing the contracts or even after, we're not going to refund that doc fee. We will refund the down payment in that scenario because we do have a guarantee and that would apply in the rare occasion that someone says, you know, I really need to go, you know, get my feet on this property and take a look around and we convince them that they should put their money down to lock up the property. We will negotiate a timeframe, but we want to know a few things while we're doing that. So we want to know when they're going to the property and when we can expect to hear back from them. And we'll set some kind of deadline as to moving forward. So if they're going out over the weekend, we'll say, okay, great, so you're going to, you're going to go Saturday. Can you get back to us on Sunday? No, I can't. Okay, well, Monday you can get back to me. Great. So we'll look to hear from you Monday. If we don't hear from you Monday, we assume everything's moving forward. We're going to create the contracts and send them over your way. And we'll just, you know, go according to the plan of what was discussed. But we try not to do that that often. But I would say it happens once in a while every, I don't know, two to three months. But most of the time we're just, we're moving right into contracts when that money comes in.

Okay. Again, I have so many thoughts about this, but I'm going to hold off. I want to hear what Tria putting in the reps. Harris has to say.

A very similar process to Eric's. We collect DOC and down payment at the same time, and within 24 hours, they have a contract. So once we begin contract generation, we don't refund the doc fee. There's only been one time we've refunded the doc fee, and that was due to an error with our sales manager. And we felt like it wasn't the buyer's fault. They didn't back out. So we did refund it in that case. But for the most part, you change your mind or whatever, that doc fee does not get refunded. We have rarely had someone who've asked us to hold the property for an extended period of time. We'll hold it for maybe a week. If it's Monday, you're going out the next weekend. But anything beyond that, we won't even take it because those people typically, we found, don't really perform well. They'll want their money back, they don't go out, and it becomes a bigger hassle. So when people start asking, can we hold it? We can for a small amount of time. But once we give them our time frame, typically they want it or they don't.

I love it. I love it. Okay, I'm Sorry, I threw in my opinion there.

I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate.

Litchfield, what are your. What are your thoughts?

I'll hold your. I'll hold the property for as long as you want, as long as you make the down payment in doc fee today.

Okay, so there's no. There's no.

Okay.

Now let's say they make their down payment, they put it. They pay the doc fee today, and they never sign the contract.

Okay.

And you never hear from them again.

They ghost you, they become a ghost.

What do you do?

Well, we're going to, you know, we're going to harass you a little bit. We're going to call, text, email, repeatedly, multiple days in a row. But at the end of the day, we're also, you know, we can take a hint. And if you ghost me after you put down, say, 500 bucks, it tells me that you're probably embarrassed, but you've changed your mind. And so if that's the case, we'll reserve the property for a little bit, you know, and we'll probably start marketing it again here shortly. If you were to ever get back in touch with us and complain, we would just give you your money back. Not your doc fee. That's the way we handle it.

Not doc fee.

Okay, yeah, the doc fees. I mean, look, I got expenses, right? And I think that's what we need to explain here is that the doc fee goes into my va, it goes to the sales team, it goes to software, right? It's not free money for me. So if I have to take time out of my day, or my team does, to put together a set of documents and send them via sign now, right? Signature like that. That's a subscription. I got to pay for that. That wasn't free to do. So that is ours kind of forever.

Okay, Scott? Todd.

I don't know.

Is there anything else left to be said? I mean, like, I think everybody's covered it, right? Like once the. Like once the doc fee or once the documents are created, the, you know, the doc fees, non refundable. Now, there is a little thing, though. You know, look, if you go and send someone, and this is my own opinion, okay, like, you go and you send someone a contract to sign, and they don't sign it, okay? They put the down payment down. That's why we don't do docs until they put the down payment down. So they put down the down payment, they pay the doc fee. You did the docs. They never signed these docs. You know, the question Is, is like, well, how long do you sit on them? Well, you know, that's a very valid question because do you go back and refund them at a certain time? Which you could, you could just say, hey, listen, if we don't hear from this in, you know, 10 days, for example, you know, you can start to give them a countdown clock. Hey, 10 days, the contract's going to be canceled. And at that point, we will refund your, you know, your doc fee, for example, I'm sorry, your down payment. So that's one way of doing it. There's another way of doing it, too, and that is, is that you could just sit on the. You could just basically sit on a contract, meaning, like, hey, we're going to go ahead and we're going to put it into Geek, for example, Even though it's not signed, we're going to go put into Geek Pay. We're going to create your account, okay? So we go create the account. Now the timer's ticking, right? Like, your first payments due in 30 days, okay? The first payments do 30 days after you make the, the, the sale, put in Geekback. Then 60 days, it's in default. And then you send them a notice of default. You're like, hey, it's defaulted. Well, by this time, 90 days has passed, you might be like, yeah, but they never signed the contract, right? They never signed the contract because they ghosted you. They've walked away from the money. You offered to say, hey, look, I want to. Like, we're doing this transaction. You took it off the market for them. Now something magical happens at 90 days. You know what it is, Mark?

No refund.

You can't even request a charge back.

From your bank right now.

That doesn't mean that 30 days from now or 60 days from now, they can't go and request a chargeback. And you know, you don't have a signed contract, you're going to lose that, okay? Like, you're gonna, you're gonna lose that. That deal. You might as well just not even fight it. You're just gonna lose the whole thing. But if you have something signed, well, now it's a different, different ball game, right? Because they signed for the, for the, the transaction. Beyond that, you know, after 90 days, if you don't hear from them and they then decide they're going to wake up and charge back to you, they wake up from a coma and they're like, hey, wait, I really want to do this. Oh, I never signed the contract. So I want my money back. Credit card Credit card, saying sorry doesn't work that way. And then you move on with life. And I'm not. I'm not trying to steal money from anybody. I mean, I want them to do the transaction. That said, if they're going to walk away from it after they've paid for it, what do you do with it? You have to have some process in your business to figure out this is the way we do it. Some procedure that you follow over and over and over again consistently.

Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself, but I think we're going to come full circle to the Zen master to have the final word on his own topic.

This is the first time in roundtable history Mike has gone last.

Tapping out. Too much pressure.

Huge moment.

Tapping out. No. I'm really glad we had this topic because I love everybody's answer. I always learned something around table. That's what's great about here. Right? You have different opinions and different processes. I like, you know, the thought of Tate saying, you know, hound them, because I, you know, that's what I would do if they put money down. We do that. You know, it's like, look at. You want to work with us. We're going to keep reaching out to you. You're going to execute these documents. But then I like Scott's perspective. Just put it in geek bay and follow the natural course of events and so on and so forth. So, yeah, so I may adjust. I don't have anything on our site on the listing that says it's not refundable. And I don't know if we got an opinion from all of us. I don't think many of us had it on our. On the webpage. Right. Or do any of us have it on that? Was there a show of hands? Like, how many have it on their listing?

Has it on her listing. Scott has it on his listing on the listing.

Okay.

Both Scott's had it on those things.

It'll be on my listings as soon as we hang up this podcast.

Okay. Okay. Well, my strong opinion is that there's fees in every real estate transaction. Right. And that's just the way it is. Right. If you're going to buy a house, your money goes hard at some point in that contract and you lose the right to inspect at some point. You don't have forever to do it.

Right.

So that's the number one thing for me, is that doc fee is never refundable. If we get to that point, that's just the way it is. The down payment can be Absolutely. But what Everybody said is 100%. I agree with 100%. It just depends on how your business philosophy is. Like this is the beautiful thing about business is that you can make any.

Rule you want, it doesn't matter.

But what Scott Todd said I think is the definitive answer. Whatever you do have a process for it. This is our process. This is our business philosophy. This is clearly how we handle this transaction. So your team isn't voxing you at 2 in the morning. Oh, what do we do with now? No, it's as clear this is in our process. You don't have to ask me what we're, what we do in this situation because this is what we always do in this situation. So I thought it was a great cop, a great topic, Mike Zaino. But you know what, you know, we're.

Time for Taria's Tip of the Week.

Terea Harris, Tip of the Week of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives.

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As flight school people, they're very nice people. But if you don't know, we're talking about flight School is a 16 week program that is going to take you step by step in execution. So it's not academic. This is not a do it yourself program. This is a done with you program. With your class, you will execute in real time with Scott Todd as your flight school Sherpa. And over 16 weeks he will take you up that mountain of land, investing quickly, safely, efficiently to the point where you will be doing deals guaranteed that tuition investment free, nothing. Because you're going to make your money back 180 days or less. My second son now is applying for college. You think that, you know these colleges are offering that?

Oh yeah, if your son gets all.

A's, we're going to refund his tuition.

No, they don't. You know what? They're going to teach my son for about $50,000 a year for an out of state college, how to be a professor. That's about it. That's all it's going to be.

I don't want to go off on higher education right now, but I will say that if you're going to learn more about flight school, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your family, owe it to your future self. Get on a call, go to landgeek.com training. Have a free consultation. Tate, what are you going to say? You're on mute.

You're on mute.

I was going to say, not only I think you're selling Scott short here in this program a little bit, because not only is he taking you to the top of the mountain, but he's bringing you back down safely. And that's really key. Like, anytime you. You hire a Sherpa, you pay a Sherpa not to get you to the summit. You pay a Sherpa to get you there and back. And I was doing a VIP call with one of our flight school students this week, and the guy came to the call, and I kid you not, his knowledge on county research and county selection was impressive. Like, he came so prepared. I was like, well, tell me how you got this. He's like, well, I just heard about land investing, like, three weeks before class started. I jumped in there and I'm just doing what Scott recommended. I'm like, well, you have my stamp of approval for whatever you're doing and wherever you're mailing, like, the guy's gonna kill it. And it's kind of cool because I could see that he figured out how to do this, and now it was. He was still in the process of, you know, working through everything and putting it into practice and those kind of things. But, you know, Scott's gonna not only take him to the top of the mountain, but also bring him back down safely with a business that is hopefully on a trajectory to become very, very successful, profitable. So it's really cool. And that guarantee works. So I just wanted to toot Scott's horn a little bit. I meant to vox in this the other day, but it was pretty cool.

To see Mark, you know what's kind of cool? I know, like, we're just chit chatting here and we're interrupting the commercial here. But this is kind of cool, though, is if you think about it, someone asked me a day like, aren't you nervous about, like, creating another competitor? And if you look at even this call, no one sees it like that. No one sees other land investors as competitors, right? Like, notice what Tate just said. He said, this guy is going to Kill it. Like, if this was a competition, Tay would have won. We wouldn't be on here. And then 2 Tay would be like, I don't want this guy to succeed. I want him to fail. Right. But see, the thing is, like, there's so much opportunity in land that none of us, none of us are scared. None of us see that we're creating competition. We all see it, that we're helping mankind, helping our fellow friends, you know, podcast listeners. And I think that's one of the cool things. That's what we also take into flight school, too. So those flight school people, they're really, really cool.

Yeah. And when you come to boot camp, everyone is so helpful and generous with their wisdom and their knowledge. And I agree, Scott. I mean, we have a very simple mission to help everyone get out of solo economic dependency, which means if they're not personally working, they're not making any money. And this is the best way that we know how to help you get to a point where your passive income exceeds your fixed expenses. You're working because you want to, not because you have to. And there is no competition. This market is massive. Trust me, if it gets to the point where we're not doing deals, all.

Of us on this roundtable podcast, we're shutting her down. We'll be honest. It's too many people.

But when we do the math, we know the market. There could be millions of people in what Mike Zane would call the least sexy real estate niche on the planet. Right? We shuffle paper and we make money. You go to a party and tell people you're a land investor, they yawn. Like, what does that even mean? So, you know, go to a multifamily, you know, conference. That's good for the ego. That's sexy. I've got 3,000 doors and I've raised $120 million. Right, do that. But in the meantime, we're all going to just help everybody else exceed their fixed expense, have passive income exceed their fixed expenses, and there's plenty for everybody. That was a long.

Tate.

Here. Here you go, man.

No $100.

Thanks for all the kind words. Right.

Rumor has it that the flight school is very compassionate as well.

That's what rumor has it up. Mike, I got one of these coming for you, too.

Make sure you get the right address this time, Scott, because the last one, you know, got lost.

But return to cinder. I don't know what to tell you.

Really? Nothing for the rest of us, we.

Haven'T seen the kind word.

We've said kind words. All like, come on.

This is the longest commercial ever. Can we just move on?

Trina Harris.

I love Trina Marie.

Here's your tip of the week.

Oh, we haven't done a tip.

Oh, we haven't done a tip. Okay, so today's tip is a little different. Off the beaten path. So I am always looking for, like, a good app. I work out six days a week and I get bored with my workout. So I found this incredible app that I now use called fitbod F I T B O D. And it's amazing. It allows me to go in and put what equipment I have. How do I want to work out? How long do I want to work out? It allows me to specify if I want heavy lifting or hiit type workout. It plans my whole workout. It then keeps track of my muscle recovery so it knows if I've worked abs and tries and buys on this day that my muscles may not have recovered. So it designs all of my workouts moving forward. And I can change if I don't want this, I can replace workouts or certain exercises. If I don't want to do that, I can swipe and swap it out for something else. But for those who work out or who are looking to work out and get better control of their health, fitbod is a great app for that.

This looks phenomenal. Wow, it's really cool. I'm getting tonal, so I figure, oh, nice. You know, I'm gonna, you know, because, like, Boston's laughing right now and Eric, you're laughing. You were so used. You stuck to that peloton for so long. Mark, look, I'll get back on the peloton. I'm not getting rid of the peloton. I'm gonna do those hiit workouts, I promise. I've been enjoying the weather here. I've been going on walks. Don't be so judgy, bossman.

Walks are.

I can wait like four months and buy the tonal on 50 off from you, Mark.

Okay. I want to thank the listeners.

Ouch.

You know, when Mike's Daniel cuts, he cuts deep. I want to thank the listeners and remind them that the only way that I'm going to be able to take this abuse on a weekly basis. If you do favors, follow rate, review the podcast, send us a screenshot of that review. Supporthelangic.com I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich and the secondary market on that on ebay is worth at least 2,300,000 in dollars. But in the cryptocurrency market, about 3 million. So get your copy. All of this, by the way, is facetious. Just so you know. All right. Are we good?

I feel like if someone's listening right now, we should give them something. If they're still here listening, they should get something big.

Don't worry.

Thank you.

After Zano's cut, he's not getting this. I'm gonna send it to you because you and I, you and I stay. We stay.

Thank you.

That's an offer on the total is what it is.

He's pre selling it. Listen, I already got my down payment in Zaino. Shh.

Refundable. That's the question.

It will be mine. Oh, yes, it will.

I'll tell you what happened with me in the pulp time, okay? This is the God's honest truth is that my son adjusted the seat he got on there. And ever since then, it was never comfortable to ride again. Hurt my legs.

Yeah.

The Wilper's bike fit.

I have to do the Wilper's bike fit, and then I know.

I.

Look, am I making excuses?

Know your number.

100%. Is it a terrible excuse? 100%.

Is this a solvable problem?

Absolutely. But I just want to put it out there that it wasn't just that I stopped. There was a reason. All right, let's just do this.

Mark, you know what happened to me?

Wait, what? What happened?

I got the 100 ride shirt. Mission accomplished. And there's no other goals after that. So it's Peloton's fault. Not my fault.

Eric.

There's all kinds of goals after that.

A shirt, a car, badges, many badges.

Badges.

What can I do with those badges? Nothing. I can't. I can't even print them out.

Yeah, you could. You could take a picture and print them if you had to.

Blazing Saddles. We don't need no stinking badges.

All right.

Are you doing this? 1, 2, 3.

Let's let freedom bring.

All right. And by the way, for those of you that are watching the video, and that's like three of you, you'll notice we did not change clothes. We're doing a different roundtable schedule. We're recording now, back to back, so don't say that. It's not. Well, they're going to see the rich. No one's going to hear poor hygiene.

They're not seeing them back to back. They're gonna see them a week apart.

Yeah, they won't remember.

They don't remember.

Whatever.

It's out.

Tate's out.

We should all go just like that.

Yeah. That was the. The Irish goodbye. Yeah, yeah. I mean, fine. That's just by. It's just by. By the way. I'm envious. I'm envious of the Irish goodbye. The way we say goodbye to my family, it's like. It's like a 30 minute process. Bossman knows what I'm talking about. Zaino, do you guys have that?

Yeah, my kids came out of the hug. They kick out of the house with like 30 hugs and 20 kisses. And they say it's the Italian goodbye. Yeah, it takes forever.

The Italian goodbye. Triad. You know what I'm talking about?

No, I have boys. They barely say bye. So. Okay, so they text me later.

Eric, how about the goodbye in your family?

We try to keep it short.

Short.

Okay.

See, Scott.

Bye.

Bye. See? Thanks, everybody.

There's your answer.

And the recording stops.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let freedom ring.