In this interview, Kevin Price and Brian Spitz discuss more title issues, specifically, what to do with a house when someone dies without a will. Brian discusses affidavit of hiership.
Check out the interview here: https://soundcloud.com/brian-a-spitz/cspitz-1
Transcript
Kevin Price
Welcome back to The Price of Business. I’m your host Kevin Price, talking to you about you and your business. We’re talking to my good friend, the one and only Brian Spitz. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s a real estate investor—one of the most brilliant people I know out there when it comes to talking about what’s happening on the real estate front, and he’s got a company called Big State Home Buyers, and it’s bigstatehomebuyers.com. While you’re there, spend some time at one of my favorite places to check out, which is the investors page and see what he’s got going on there. Brian, welcome to the program.
Brian Spitz
Hey, good morning, Kevin. How are you?
Kevin Price
Going, good. Glad to have you on today’s show. Talking a little bit—first of all, we haven’t done this in a little while, but kind of give an overview of what Big State Home Buyers and Big State House Deals are all about.
Brian Spitz
All right, Big State Home Buyers is a unique company. What we do is we’re a service-focused company that’s helps sellers sell their properties quickly, whether they have any kind of title problems or the house needs repairs, there’s been a divorce or a death, or someone who just doesn’t want to put the house on the real estate market. They can call us, visit us at bigstatehomebuyers.com. We’ll come out. We’ll make an offer on the house.We’ll purchase it quickly and prevent you from having to go through the traditional real estate sale. It’s really good for people that especially have inherited properties or anything of that nature, and we’re known for our service. We won 2 awards from the Better Business Bureau for it, and then for investors—for other people in our community—we sell properties to them at a discount that they can then add to their real estate investment portfolios, either by renovating them for resale or renovating them to use as rental properties. So we service both the individual seller and we also service the individual buyers.
Kevin Price
Yeah, absolutely fantastic, and it’s very seamless in what you try to do.
Brian Spitz
Yeah.
Kevin Price
You try to make it where people can focus on their primary work, whatever that is, and they can really have their real estate deals as passive income.
Brian Spitz
Right, absolutely. It lets people who otherwise don’t make this their full-time job or who don’t want to put a lot of time and energy into either side of buying and selling. It just facilitates, like you said, a seamless real estate transaction for both sides.
Kevin Price
So tell us about what you’ve got going on right now. What are you bringing in for us today?
Brian Spitz
Well, last week we started a conversation about working with title issues and buying properties that have title problems or solving title issues, which is what we do here at Big State, and we did a blog this week at bigstatehomebuyers.com and on your web site, The Price of Business, and we focused this on one particular common title question, which is what happens when somebody dies without a will? What happens to the house? So it’s a really common situation. A lot of our sellers come to us because they’ve inherited a house, and someone is going to have to pay the taxes and keep the yard and the insurance, and then also possibly deal with any estate matters from the family, and a lot of people die without leaving a will behind, so people don’t know what happens to the house, and they give us a call, and we can solve that problem for them by doing what’s called—and you can read about it on blog—an affidavit of heirship, where we basically work with the Texas property code to put then right person in title. We change title over for you and walk you through the process so that you can sell the house if you’ve inherited it.
Kevin Price
Wow, that’s awesome! So you’ve made it, again, even that process step-by-step.
Brian Spitz
Right, and this is a—you know you can go to an attorney and spend—even if you’ve inherited a house and there is a will, but there’s not a lot to the estate other than a property and some simple cash. You don’t have to go to probate court in order to sell the property, because that could be a 6-month process easily. Meanwhile, you’re paying taxes and taking care of all this stuff for the estate. You can come to us and we’ll walk you through doing an affidavit of heirship with our attorneys at no cost, and any attorney would charge you at least $1,500 to do this.
Kevin Price
Yeah.
Brian Spitz
So we do it step by step. We take you from whatever situation you’re in right now regarding title issue or an estate and get you from where you are to a closing so that you can get rid of the house and get on with your life.
Kevin Price
Yeah, very interesting. Talking to Brian Spitz. Talking about how people can really, again, own this important process. The title assist is such a singly important item when it comes to your house transactions, and there are a lot of nightmares when it comes to that. True?
Brian Spitz
Yeah, absolutely, and there are a lot of things people don’t know about who rightfully inherits the property, and the Texas probate code is different than some people might think, so it’s really important to investigate, whether you’re buying a house from someone from an estate, to make sure the title is clear, or if you’re selling a house, to make sure that all the parties are involved in the—that need to be involved are there. We recently bought a house a couple of months ago from a couple of sisters, and the 2 sisters where estranged and hadn’t spoken in 11 years, but both of them needed to sign in order to sell the house and settle the estate, so we helped the one sister track her other sister down and dealt with them separately because there were some issues between them, so we’re real sensitive to any family issues, but we still do whatever it takes to get the house sold—to get the transaction done. So we worked as an intermediary and located the second sister and just really worked with them separately to make sure they were both satisfied and that the estate was able to close out.
Kevin Price
Yeah, and that’s the kind of stuff most people simply won’t do. That’s the kind of stuff you simply won’t find happening out there. I do want to encourage people to go check out big state—I’m sorry, priceofbusiness.com, on the right-hand side, upper column, you see the contributors. Brian Spitz always ranks high. He’s one of our most prolific writers. He’s got some great articles that are really almost tutorials on a lot of these issues—tax credits in favor of home ownership, audios from The Price of Business show that really provide audio presentations. We really provide a lot or practical information in our audios. Big State wins Award of Distinction, and it is an important award from the Better Business Bureau. We talked about that on the show. You can read more about that award over there at priceofbusiness.com. How to resolve title issues when selling your house. Houston’s getting a new area code. Hey, what area code is that?
Brian Spitz
To be honest with you, I’ve got to go back and look. I don’t even remember.
Kevin Price
All right. We’ll look at that.
Brian Spitz
That’ll be a change for us.
Kevin Price
Yeah, that will be and it just shows the continued growth of this great city—the fastest growing city in America. Legal advice—what sellers should know. What happens to a house when someone dies without a will, and then existing home inventory is up. Are we nearing a bottom? What about that? Are we nearing a bottom?
Brian Spitz
No, I don’t think so. I think that the real estate inventory in this city is still—the supply and demand is pretty strong. More and more people are selling their properties because they see that the demand is so high, but real estate prices are still climbing because—frankly, especially in the inner loop, but there hasn’t been enough supply the past couple of years, and when the market fell a lot of developers and builders stopped building, so now all of that stuff is absorbed off the market. Foreclosures are pretty well absorbed out of the market, so really what we’re dealing with now is top of the market, and we’re watching the market grow and grow and grow. It’s still a steady growth. It’s a safe growth though because this is such an expanding, booming city, and there are so many industries here at Houston that makes it a solid, safe place to invest.
Brian Spitz
There always are going to be people that want to buy here and always people that want to rent here and have jobs here so it’s always a good time to get into the real estate market, whether you’re investing, or selling, or buying, whatever. It’s always a good time for that here.
Kevin Price
The new area code is 346. What’s cool about it is that they’re just adding that area code. It has no effect on—it’s only going to be for new phone numbers—area code 346. This shows the enormous growth of Houston, soon to be—very soon—almost any day now—the third largest city in America as Chicago shrinks rapidly. We’re the fastest growing city in America. Brian Spitz, he is the founder and president of Big State Home Buyers, and you need to check it out—bigstatehomebuyers.com. As always, thanks for being with us.
Brian Spitz
Take it easy, Kevin.
Kevin Price
All right. You might give him a shout as well—713-263-7466. I’m Kevin Price. You’re listening to The Price of Business.
