Why do ‘Jesse’ and ‘Dayton’ want to buy your Thurston County home?
The red-hot Thurston County housing market has been driven by low inventory and out-of-area demand that have pushed prices steadily higher.
In October, the median price rose 14 percent from October 2020 to nearly $475,000, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service data.
Not only has the state of the market kept real estate professionals busy, it has presented new opportunities for those who operate on the margins of the industry, such as house flippers and others, who have been flooding the area with postcard mailers, texts, and fliers offering to buy homes.
One of the most common, with a return address in Vancouver, Washington, makes a hand-written pitch to buy your home and is signed, “Sincerely, Jesse.” Another is a text to your smart phone from “Dayton.”
“Hello! It’s Dayton, do you still own (the address of the home) by chance? Thx.”
Or perhaps you’ve noticed the almost ubiquitous yellow signs hammered to power poles throughout the region, offering to pay cash for homes.
“These types of letters, and the offers they contain, have been around as long as I can remember, in all kinds of market conditions,” said Ken Anderson, president and owner of Coldwell Banker Evergreen Olympic Realty in Olympia.
However, Anderson acknowledged that in a hot real estate market “that evidence seems to be amassing more and more,” he said.
Hello? Jesse?
The Olympian, which has been collecting mailers and jotting down the phone numbers of texts, set out to call “Jesse” and “Dayton,” but with little success. A reporter also called some of the numbers found on those yellow signs. Keith Sant of Tacoma called back.
Sant, 33, has been buying and selling homes throughout the state for four years through a business he calls Kind House Buyers. He has partner-investors and makes cash offers for property. He has a website and said the “yellow sign” approach is about as invasive as his marketing gets. He does not market via mailers or texts, he said.
“I’ve always been interested in real estate,” he said, but making it work for him has been a learning process. He lost money on the first foreclosed home he bought, and waited out the Great Recession on another property after he paid $175,000 for a home in Graham in 2007, then watched as it fell below $100,000 in value. The market finally recovered and he sold it for $300,000.
“Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn,” Sant said.
For Sant and others who pay cash for homes — Dallas, Texas-based HomeVestors also reached out to The Olympian — expediency appears to be a factor for potential sellers, particularly those with no funds, time or energy to make repairs or replace household appliances. Some properties are in such disrepair they wouldn’t be financed by a bank, he said.
“There is a need for my service,” he said.
Amanda Richeson found Sant online after she had to do something about her father-in-law and his home in Spanaway. His health began to deteriorate and the condition of his manufactured home deteriorated along with it. The Richesons, who were living in Vancouver, Washington at the time and who had plans to relocate to Kentucky, reached out to Sant and he made an offer before seeing the house.
“This guy is crazy,” she thought. She knew the roof leaked, not all of the electrical worked, and an addition to the house was not built to code, which resulted in a lien on the property.
The Richesons main interest was to pay off what her father-in-law owed and to have enough left over for the move. He owed about $80,000 and Sant offered around $84,000, she said.
“He was very professional, very respectful and very flexible,” she said.
Sant is a regional player in flipping homes (in which someone buys a home, repairs it and sells the home again), but HomeVestors is a national player, best known for the slogan, “We buy ugly houses.”
Through a PR firm, HomeVestors contacted the paper, saying the “ugly” houses they buy “apply to the ugly situations sellers find themselves in after a death, divorce, foreclosure, or other difficult life event.”
HomeVestors claims the We Buy Ugly Houses franchise sold more than 10,000 homes in 2020, generating sales of more than $1.6 billion, the Miami Herald reported in March.
According to the paper, David Hicks, CEO of HomeVestors, said the majority of clients fall into three categories: People who have inherited a home, family members of a senior citizen who need cash to put their parent or relative into an assisted living facility, or empty nesters looking to down size and move to a condo.
The business both resells property or holds on to it as investment property — most likely as a rental.
“When purchasing houses, our franchises are required to be in compliance with all laws,” officials with HomeVestors said. “The professionals at their title companies, as well as their closing attorneys, have state licenses requiring their legal compliance, and they should not complete a closing when ownership or competency of sellers is questioned. Additionally, HomeVestors has a long history of condemning illegal schemes and underhanded methods used by some real estate investors.”
What should you do?
If you have been intrigued by a mailer or text or yellow sign offering cash for your home, here is perhaps the most important thing to consider: “Any unsolicited offer is going to be likely lower than the value of the home,” said Tadeu Velloso, a real estate, business and land-use attorney with Phillips Burgess in Olympia.
He said property owners should do their homework, and they can start by looking up the county assessed value of their home. Another step, particularly if the seller doesn’t want to work with a real estate broker, is to hire an appraiser to determine the value of the home. Consulting a real estate broker or an attorney is yet another step, he said.
To the unsophisticated, the cash offer might be intriguing, Velloso said. “It also might be undervaluing the property,” he said.
Coldwell Banker’s Anderson said it’s best to have someone in your corner.
“Our advice is always the same to our clients interested in selling: Be sure to have expert representation on your side,” he said. “With that comes guidance about the market, the best terms, conditions and protections, as well as management of the closing process. And it is critical to list the home on the market. Only then can a seller be confident they received the best the market will give.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
