How does Probate Affect a Note Investing Deal? | Real Estate Notes Show

Episode: How does Probate Affect a Note Investing deal? Dave's Goals and Plans: - Steered away from assets with probate heirs due to lack of knowledge and experience - Currently owns a few probate heir deals that are in process - Having difficulty with county recording issues and missing collateral file documents - Prefers to wait for proper recording before doing subject-to deals to avoid hassle - Posted in Facebook group asking for experiences with converting second mortgage loans to first position Nathan's Goals and Plans: - Buys loans with deceased borrowers regularly due to price point and lack of wills - Currently has couple of deals in Florida with deceased borrowers - Has had generally positive experiences with probate deals, though sometimes more time consuming - Recently recorded documents electronically in two counties with fast turnaround within hours - Dealing with significant eviction backlog in some counties lasting two years Key Recommendations: - Collect court orders from probate process to confirm title transfer to heirs - Verify all heirs are identified to avoid title issues at default - Understand the difference between legal expertise and investment strategy - attorneys know law but not investment mechanics - Request detailed documentation in collateral files before closing on probate deals - Post questions about problematic loan structures (like second-to-first conversions) in investor communities for peer experience Topics Discussed: - Probate definition and court order processes - Wills vs.

no-will probate situations - Title transfer requirements for deceased borrowers - Heir identification and potential disputes - County recording delays and backlog issues - Eviction complications with deceased borrowers - Difference between legal and investment knowledge - Second mortgage to first position loan conversions Guest Insights: - Probate process is simpler and more streamlined than commonly understood in real estate - Wills don't necessarily avoid probate - still requires court paperwork process - Complex wills leaving property to trusts or multiple heirs can complicate deals significantly - Court orders are the key document confirming heirs have received title - No-will situations can sometimes be simpler than situations with wills that create complications Episode: How does Probate Affect a Note Investing deal? Guest: Al (full name not provided in transcript) Summary: Dave Putz and Nathan Turner discuss how probate and deceased borrowers affect note investing deals, highlighting the importance of understanding probate law while recognizing that legal expertise differs from investment knowledge.

Main Topics: How probate affects note investing deals, Understanding probate heirs and their impact on loan acquisitions, Difference between legal expertise and investment knowledge, Recording issues and county backlogs in real estate transactions, Unconventional loan types (lease options, second mortgages converting to first), Conference insights on economic conditions and market outlook Key Takeaways: Probate deals are generally manageable but can be more time-consuming than standard transactions | Attorneys understand the legal framework but often lack understanding of the investment side and cash flow generation | Recording delays and county backlogs vary significantly by location and document type | The investment world operates differently from the legal world despite overlapping concerns | Note investors should seek specialized knowledge when dealing with probate heirs and deceased borrowers | Market sentiment suggests economic changes are coming but uncertainty exists about timing and severity Keywords: probate, note investing, deceased borrower, heirs, recording issues, first position mortgage, cash flow, legal vs investment, loan acquisition, real estate notes hey everyone dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me as always mr nathan turner how are you man very good very good awesome awesome so we're gonna bring out a few minutes but we want to catch up for a few minutes before we do that um be sure you can check out the replay for those who always ask on the youtube channel all the good stuff but nathan how are things been for you man back-to-back conferences and then getting back from that so a lot of catching up um which has been good um it's great when you've got the systems in place and you've got everything going and then it helps to get that ketchup done sooner than later which is really nice it's interesting because you know i wasn't away for the conferences which actually was a blessing in the skies things have been blowing up just little things here and there so it's been a little hectic but how was when you came back to the conferences did you feel rejuvenated did you feel different i did you know it's especially after being away so long i remember just before kovid i was i was getting tired and i'm like i'm not sure i want to even go to any more like i'm just i'm burnt out tired traveling it sounds fun it's just it's tiring and it it takes a lot of you know physical especially back to back yeah yeah so it but so i was i was relieved for a break there for a little while but uh but being back together with everybody and people i know and people i don't know and and uh you know getting information and everybody's kind of take on where we're at and where we're going and that's great it's good to be around you know like-minded people and just to be able to connect on that way yeah with you know the people there were they as our conversation in the past couple months has been about this economy where it's going all stuff did you get the same buy from those people that it there's something coming but they're not sure yeah a lot of discussion on that especially at the imn conference um with some of the the you know more macro looking people um a lot of discussion on that and and the general feeling is yes something's coming and it's just around the corner and you know how big of a corner is that is that you know six months is that 18 months who knows but uh but something's coming and then the other question is how big um you know somebody was saying tsunami and then other people are saying you know a bump and i just who knows anything in between so um i did make a post in the facebook group that i'd like to get into eventually i mean i'll talk later about there's some people out there selling these loans that are second musician loans they want to convert to first and just curious how people play it so if you have experience with that i'd love to see your thoughts on it if you can put into the facebook group and tag and understand that um if you've gone through that and you've been successful or you're the seller maybe you can clarify what that may mean and how that can look because that to me it's not comfortable um i'm hoping that you would pay off the first with the money and the link get released but i don't know so yeah that's it that's a little odd yeah you know i've i've bought a bunch of kind of odd loans in the past including like lease options and things like that but i've never heard of this that's that's a near kind of odd so like see how that would work right now we've um we're having a hard time right now buying assets right now we're having a lot of counties not able to record issues and problems um yeah we've gotten a pool of acid that we closed in on but the when we were looking through the collateral file or some things that were missing um so we're fixing them or the cell is fixing them but the recording is taking a while um i can buy it subject to but i want to make sure everything goes fine on that side before we do it um i don't want to do the hassle with it so are you running to that kind of stuff where it's been problem um not really actually i just recorded some stuff just electronically uh just yesterday in fact and and uh two different counties they came back you know within hours okay so that was nice and fast and easy cool um on the other hand i have other counties where i'm doing like an eviction or something that's taken forever and there's all kinds of backlog on that and that's that's you know it's frustrating we've been like two years paying nothing and now yeah we're having trouble getting him out it's what a pain so one of the things that i think i've steered away from in all these years is assets with um probate heirs i've dealt with them i've owned them i have a few right now that we're going through but it's something that i don't get into a lot just because of lack of knowledge lack of experience um and we want to bring al on nathan bring him on to the show to kind of talk about this right yeah nathan what's your experience with probate and heirs everything i've dealt with has been we've gotten away with it everything went well yeah me too it's been generally it's been okay sometimes a little bit more time consuming but yeah i'll buy loans all the time with a deceased borrower um generally because of my price point there is no will so we're having to kind of go through a process uh in fact i've got a couple like this actually down in florida before i met l but i know alex al's the expert on on all things probate so we wanted to bring him on and talk about what is probate and how does it work and and how do you take advantage of it so it's a shingle bringing along here is going to clarify a lot of stuff remember guys when we bring on people here it's not just for you guys to know we're learning doing this whole thing so how welcome to me nathan's show man appreciate you coming on david nathan thank you so much for having me i'm glad we were able to schedule this get it on the books yeah yeah it was crazy too because just two days ago uh nathan was on my show yeah and i was learning all about notes for the first time myself and i'm like i don't know anything about it i told the audience the same thing i said y'all i got no idea what this thing is about and let's we're gonna learn it today so i feel you when you when you talk about uh learning probate and what it breaking it down and learning all about it so just wanna say thank you both for having me you know going live with your audience and anybody that's out there that has questions you know drop your comment below and share it and maybe we'll have time to get to that funny we i've taught a lot of new investors and this was something i didn't understand when i first got into what do you mean an attorney doesn't understand the investment side they're attorneys they know everything and what you learned over time is they know how to be an attorney they don't understand the investment side they don't share how it plays in they had to work the deal on a legal side when it comes to anything else they're lost it the investment world is different right you know we could tell you about personal liability on a note a security interest and you know who can sign or maybe do the deal or the transaction at a closing but when it comes to how you can generate cash flow and generational wealth through note investing and through uh being in first position on on on a deal they don't teach you that in school they don't i mean you don't you don't even learn that in the first two three years you jumped into real estate like it's only when somebody presents you with an opportunity or a potential deal and they say hey we're not trying to buy the property we're actually trying to be in first position on that mortgage you're like what like what is this and that's when the reality sets that you know there's law and there's the legal world but then there's the investing world so um you know great point david about there's there's really two different worlds and and and it can help learning the legal world and seeing other people uh do the investing side so you can kind of see strategies and ideas but um definitely two different worlds yeah yeah so let's dive right into this yes what is probate for for those who are like i'm not afraid of probating what the word means right okay so basics um and and we can leave it to the real estate world but we can also bring it up in the brokerage account the bank account car world but the basic idea is somebody owned an asset let's just say they owned the real estate and it's in their name it's in that person's name only there's there's no magic language on deeds there's no two three four people um with magic language it's like let's just say there's somebody that owns a piece of property and their name and there could be other people on it but go with me on this right they own it they die now in order for that person's interest to transfer to the true heirs whether there's a will or no will there's a paperwork process that goes through court moving it over to the true heirs whoever they are that process is probate that process of moving the title of what that person had to those heirs is probate bottom line and then it where it gets interesting i'm sure is where there's no will and then there's several um potential errors and they get all in kind of you know some kind of a battle on who who gets what and how much and all that kind of fun stuff oh i got i got stories about that i mean i got i got power points for days on that um yeah you know the the wills you know wills and no wills and uh we can dive into that you know i'm only in florida for those that are watching so in the florida market uh wills don't avoid probate right a lot of people think that just because you have a will okay great now we don't have to go through that paperwork process you actually still do um and sometimes it gets trickier with wills because sometimes somebody will do a will and they won't just leave it to people they'll leave it to a trust um and then there's beneficiaries of a trust or sometimes they don't know where the trust is and it becomes crazy and wonky and how do you get around that or sometimes they'll in the will they'll leave it to five of the blood children and then one step child and now it throws everything off about you know what kind of probate how do you do this how do you overcome it and then of course you get people that say you know dad didn't want you to get it mom didn't want you to get that and then you get in a tussle with things so you know sometimes no will actually ends up being pretty much simpler sometimes um it can get messy when there's eight kids ever and the will should have left it to two or could have left it to three but you know because of nobel's eight kids and it can kill the deal um i i we can dive into stories but the the world of probate is a lot simpler and more streamlined than i think a lot of people have ever understood it at least in my world especially in real estate so what probate happens right we have people who pass away and they had things down and they go through the probate process for us as a lender what can we ask the borrower for to confirm probates happened and what should we collect to ensure that everything's in a row in the deal or what should what should we have as the lender have in our file to show the fact that this has transferred over um well one of the things you're looking for is the court orders right so the court orders in probate actually transfer over the interest and so once that order signed now the heirs have the title to the property and then technically they can do a mortgage with you or um some kind of note arrangement with uh the lender at that point because how how it's just like title insurance on a mortgage side do you even want to get into it if you don't know who all the errors are and that can back up your loan later in case of the default so the the order that you're looking for is that and then also you get these bigger probates sometimes where there's like the executor personal representative and sometimes they're able to either refinance or restructure the deal on behalf of the estate if it's beneficial right so um there's different there's different things along the way that you'd be looking for like those court orders um but ultimately the you can't really do anything until you get those so again another kind of wrinkle in our world is um let's say you know so the the borrower was on title and then passed away um still nobody's paying on that mortgage so do we have to wait until probate is done before we can even start a foreclosure no actually you could technically start the foreclosure um so that's a great question because i got asked that yesterday which was um can a bank move forward on a foreclosure even though the probate's not done right and the answer is yes they can it's just in the foreclosure you're naming the estate and then you're having an investigator do due diligence to try to find all potential heirs you know to try to serve them because now you're trying to extinguish them out of an interest or right that they have so you can move forward on a foreclosure um you're just naming the estate now in the meantime if all of a sudden one of the heirs came up and said hey we need to do probate no no we want to make sure that we have a buyer let's just say you all had the loan with with the deceased and let's just say they're able to procure a buyer who's going to make you a whole and they're going to make money off the transaction sometimes those are the best arrangements when you can potentially line them up with a buyer so you get the money uh back that you've paid all the principal and interest uh on on your loan i mean it's no different than a bank you know with a mortgage right you know you're doing that with your your notes and your your mortgages so um the other thing um that came to mind is uh you know some sometimes you may have a situation where you have that where somebody died and now the estate they want to honor the agreement maybe they want to honor the loan they want to keep it at the rate that you're at because maybe the interest rate you have off that note is good right let's just say it's at you know three percent but now the rates are going to four or five percent um and they want to maintain it maybe there's a way that in the probate they can appoint somebody to be the personal representative and maybe make that new arrangement with the new heirs or the estate so there's there's a couple different ways it can go with the mortgages what is the process to find all the errors and you know that's one of the other problems running two is where you're going through the process everything looks great you have you know three four errors that's it and then all of a sudden they come out of the woodworks right and you're like i gotta start over i gotta resell you know it becomes a process what is the process of finding air and how can they jump back in the middle of the process after you already served everybody so i've actually never seen a um a time in a probate where all of a sudden we've done a probate and then all of a sudden somebody pops out i've actually i haven't seen it to date okay um yeah and um i don't know maybe maybe it's the way i'm asking my questions uh that seems to get all the answers but you know we're we're always asking the heirs you know how many ever how many you know some some people want to say you know hey um we're interested in the probate you shoot me an email with your questions and i'm like no uh we're gonna do we're gonna do how many kids ever ever ev you know and it's like as soon as i start getting on the phone and really communicating we get answers right so not only is communication with them key um and drilling that down but even as you know when we send the documents to everybody if if there's somebody missing or there's somebody that's not supposed to be included they'll let you know right now in terms of your world with foreclosures that's what gets interesting right because you're shooting uh you're shooting in the dark when it comes to finding errors you're depending on an investigator or an affidavit of due diligence or some kind of uh document that's saying these are the potential heirs now and then you get a guardian ad litem guardian starts finding out more people that's when it gets trickier right because you've never talked to the source so the only thing that you could do in those kinds of cases and i've had i've had really good conversations with the investigator we use on quiet titles it's not only just doing a first degree search but a second degree search sometimes um you may be going a little overboard with second degrees because now you're starting to explain what second degree is for those who may not know not just not just immediate like spouse children but now you may be going like parents brothers sisters nieces nephews so just a little bit out in the family um because you never know maybe there was no spouse maybe there was no kids or parents or something like that um you know third degree and fourth degree going way down cousins and you know pre-deceased people maybe probably too crazy but yeah yeah and i'm just thinking in your world of foreclosures and doing due diligence right and because we see that in quiet titles we you know we have one right now where it's an adverse possession case and lady got title to the property more than seven years ago and she's been on a deed so she's got grounds to claim title to the property well come to find out we have to go back all the way to these 2-3 trusts and i have 40 people we're serving we serve 40 people and half of them are alive and half of them are dead and but here's the thing we did our due diligence to try to find them we found death certificates we'll do a newspaper publication you know and this is this is the world of not even probate this is the world of due diligence and searching and trying to find these people because i know you're i know where you're going with that yeah oh my lord yeah serving people i'm i've had that before where we thought we served everyone and then all of a sudden there was somebody else that we didn't serve or something like that or the court said no no you didn't serve properly and so we had to go back and do it all over again and it's a huge pain so if you can get it right the first time it saves you just a ton of time yeah and and people you know a lot of times the the lenders as clients to a law firm that's doing the foreclosure you know they're they're wanting to make sure that they're not overspending on costs right like you know these things get expensive sometimes the the filing and the service and all of it but at the end of the day when going through those those suits um doing that newspaper publication actually is really critical getting that guardian ad litem as the backstop is really critical and so sometimes spending the extra cost end up uh having a greater benefit later without having to go all the way back because if you have all these measures these these backstops um you can move forward on this and at the end of the day what are you supposed to do when you can't find anybody i mean right yeah you know you tried so the one that you mentioned there the newspaper publication i know we've done that in the past just to kind of clarify it is that is the newspaper publication trying to find a specific person or that's just a public notification and and if we can't find them then that will suffice as publication both so yeah so actually it could be both it's first of all the the reason we're doing is because we couldn't find somebody or or multiple people right we the process server tried going three four times finding all these addresses couldn't find them then we're doing a newspaper to that one person to put them on notice but then at the same time we're kind of doing it out in the world to say hey there's a cause of action here there's a foreclosure there's a quiet title speak now and come forward um but you know that that world is so different than probate like we that's a whole different world other than probate and you know we can get into that but probate probate is the is fascinating to me because a lot of people think it takes forever right they think it takes six nine months twelve months when i've done things in two weeks four weeks six weeks two months wow yeah yeah david's hearing that for the first time have seen everybody's face at the new view conference david when everybody when i was telling everybody the timings they're like what um and uh you know and so buyers are now not waiting forever they're not waiting forever on a deal which is the best part about it um but also the fact that so many of these heirs don't have the money to front to do the lawsuit right they or the the probate they don't have the money to do probate so where i'm able to jump in is waiting until the closing the hud settlement statement for payment so um the sa the same would be even if there was a refinance and they had to do a refi um and they were getting a cash out on the refi were you even able to wait until that settlement statement for for payment and that helps everybody because they wouldn't have been able to do the refinance they wouldn't have been able to do the sale without some kind of useful structure to these deals and i think that's been the model that's helped a lot of sellers go through these situations so you're talking two four weeks six weeks through probate and that's amazing right um is there something is the lender that we can do say we have an asset we have a bunch of assets right now that that a couple of them have some deceased people in there we're having a hard time get a hold of the heirs but they're paying the bill which is what it is we're happy about that but is there something from the lender side that we can kind of get caught up on and and is something i can do now to file it we're trying to find out they file probate limited information we're trying to find out if they do have errors who's there and what happened is there a way we can go get the court records get the information and what kind of you know find out if there's any other errors and how much does it cost to do this as a lender to find out the information so you know the public records in florida are beautiful because everything's out there you can go through the clerks of the court and find out if somebody's done a probate you can search by maybe last name first name and see if you'll see a case number like it'll come up in florida cp for probate circuit probate um you know it's it's it's out there um and i think one of the ways that you can find it is through those mediums and then um the other way is death certificates could be a great source because if if some if you know that the person died and maybe you have an uh a name and a a date of death there may be a way to pull the death certificate and see an informant that's named on the death certificate and that could lead you to a mailing address or a name and you can skip trace that name because somebody filled it out somebody filled out the death certificate right um so that that could be another way of potentially finding those errors in those situations um but other than that skip tracing genealogy uh reports like from a genealogist that aren't that expensive uh somebody that can perform a full skip of you know who people are and where they are those could be ways that you can find air so it's it can be really really helpful because that's a big thing right now is that if you're getting a list of assets and you see deceased right statement away from them yeah just because it's a little more hairy a little more issues we're saying now is that this may not be true and i just wanted to come and you know victor said victor wright just so low and uh sydney went through this coleman went through this during coven you know some of the posts are coming through i'm curious though from this point of view is that what you're saying is we where should we be careful with looking at assets what kind of gotchas are involved with this possibility of having a deceased person in dealing with that disease issue well it's also the fact that if you had the loan with the deceased person there's no recourse against the heirs so if you're trying to if if you don't know if you're going to make your money back off the foreclosure and there's going to be a deficiency judgment you're you're you don't really have that position to go after anybody for the deficiency because your loan was only with the deceased so um yeah and the other thing is if you're i don't know this just came through my head if you're finding assets or finding properties where there are these loans that are in the name of the deceased and they own that property let's just say it's florida they own that property that may be an investment opportunity actually because you can almost go in and see if you can help buy back buy that property and um that's almost like a level of a distress right so if you see that that's an indicator of a distressed or maybe motivated seller so not even just on the loan side to try to make money off the interest rates and payments but on an investment side on the property could be good because imagine imagine somebody had that loan for 20 years and they've paid it down all the way to owing 50k off on that loan and really the arv on the property is 350.

oh my gosh i mean so you're actually in a really good position plus you don't know what kind of repairs and what kind of value you're willing to offer but what's what's the risk when you're able to just pay down 50 plus an additional up to the point where you would do rehab um those could be sweet deals on an investment opportunity so um that's how i see it from my brain you know on on the lending side of it um it's quite interesting because you just got to try to get in touch with those heirs too yeah that's really interesting because it's it's not uncommon where i'll see on a list of loans to purchase it'll be in you know a state of uh or sometimes i even buy um reverse mortgages with deceased borrowers um which i know a lot of people look at that and that's kind of hairy as well but but with the deceased borrower thing isn't necessarily a deterrent because there is a process set up to kind of navigate that and to help you to figure out how to approach that and it doesn't always necessarily have to end in foreclosure either and that's usually when i look at it in a state of name my assumption is that we're going to go to foreclosure and that may be true but if we can do a probate and work something out with the heirs uh maybe not it doesn't have to be a foreclosure yeah we're trying to do mods right that's where our plan is to do mod put this thing or you know assumption if we can do assumptions yeah you know but that's the angle here right but like nathan said we never really talk about this stuff so deceased borrower is like oh i'm gonna have to go through probate i'm gonna have to go through the process the heirs i have to work for people and they give to the foreclosure you have the mail letters away and mailed to these people they have 30 days to respond and it becomes a more of an add-on process but what you're saying here is it's not as big of a deal it's just something different that we're used to it's outside the box typical stuff that we shouldn't be afraid of it i think if you frame it in a different way where you're looking at more of a investment opportunity um maybe on the real estate end that's when it could be interesting and nathan you had me interested at the fact that purchasing reverse mortgage notes yes yeah it's it's really interesting there's there's a whole that's a whole like niche on its own and i'm curious why they even would be for sale um because those payoffs can be huge and they really put everybody in a tough position because there's there's such large payoffs and the interest rates on reverse mortgages are are i mean they i remember i still remember one of the first one of the first probate cases i picked up when i started all this like consistently um was the the beach property where there were these four uh children ever and one of them was a holdout living in the property but you know at the time they saw me the mortgage payoff was 425 and the property valued uh you know that anybody was able to want to buy it at was like 500 525 okay and i told them i said you got to move fast you got to move quickly because those reverse mortgages add up well though they couldn't get the one hold out to get out of the house eight months later they wanted an updated payoff and it was 4.85 and um so you know that's kind of interesting about about being able to buy you know i guess buy those out of even a discount um i wonder what the lenders are seeing there is the opportunity to get out you know typically it goes to the street foreclosure right it's more of a straight foreclosure play they don't want to wait 12 months because obviously there's not going to be any debate about it and robin mentioned that be a good topic for us to bring up but it's typically a foreclosure play right you're hoping that someone comes along and they work it out and they sell the property but the meantime they're not there's stock situation where you're gonna have to foreclose and go through the process because you have no one to deal with yeah yeah i think that's deceased borrower you're pretty much always looking at a foreclosure but maybe not yeah i mean and again maybe looking at it from an investment opportunity if you're able to buy that first position at a discount and you're able to see if there's equity in that property and then you can flip it and do something with it um maybe maybe you arrange it in some way with that and then you still say stay first position yeah right yeah yeah so like a reverse are going to be popping up that bunch of you are commenting on facebook they love little reverse mortgages so we'll definitely a topic in the coming weeks sorry go ahead so i had another question sir for the probate who initiates that does it have to be an error or can i as the lender say hey al we want to take this through probate okay go yeah so the the beneficiaries are mainly are the ones that start that probate right um the it's the direct beneficiaries of the deceased i've seen two times where a creditor uh was the one that initiated the probate and it was because they wanted to try to get their money back um and i actually saw it two weeks ago where they initiated the probate themselves to try to get the money but then the spouse ended up hiring a lawyer and then the creditor withdrew their claim their their petition because um at that point all they had to do was file a statement of claim right so um i've seen that i've seen that one or two times where you know they could start it um but generally it's the heirs it's the it's the children it's the spouse it's the it's maybe they don't want to they don't want to be the ones to handle it but they designate their uncle as being the one that is is going to handle the the probate or maybe open it up but if we we're dealing with people who may be in areas that are just not so involved um we can initiate that for that that probate part if we don't see any kind of record in the court saying that this has gone to probate and finalized we can do that right we can start that process of doing it just to get it done get it figured out who owns it so that if we have to file any kind of paperwork on it we know who the deed owner is obviously but we're following the borrower but then we can name those people involved i would think correct well i'd say this are you it's a security instrument so it's going to come up on title too right so anything that you're doing is coming up on title so making sure that mortgage is recorded um right but let's just say you had a loan that was an unsecured loan um there's there's you know creditors they tend to file claims so if they know that there's a probate open they'll just file what they call like a statement of claim and try to try to lock in their lock in their uh their claim but i've just rarely seen where the lender themselves they're starting the probate um just because it you can't get a a property uh sold without going through the first position second position the recorded uh lien holders right so um now if if they're not selling it and they're and then you're trying to get it back maybe that's the angle um but i've just rarely seen it one more follow-up to that if hypothetically if if i am the lender on on [Music] a loan property in florida i initiate a probate just to kind of clean up the records and and make sure that whoever's a potential error is is figured out one way or the other if then i pursue that to foreclosure can i recuperate the cost of doing the probate can i get i wonder if that's like a lender fee yeah corporate advance yeah i've never never thought about it that way nathan's getting creative yeah um but here's the other part oh why why go through a probate and foreclosure at the same time why not just do the foreclosure you're not going to know who the heirs are anyway right so the idea of probate also is to determine who all the heirs are if you don't know who the heirs are anyway why even go through that added expense when you can just bring a foreclosure um hire the guardian i light them do the newspaper try to get an independent investigator and find everybody and just move forward that way um what's the typical cost to do the guardian item do it what additional guesstimate right that if we're going through a foreclosure on an estate what's the time and a cost estimated for this process because as as investors we don't want to do any extra work any extra expense in this foreclosure process we'd rather foreclosing somebody who's living than someone who's dead what is the extra time is it is something that in conjunction of what the time frame with the court already or is it is it like we're pausing it i have to extend it and i'm spending two grand to do this plus i'm losing another month you never know that's the thing when it comes to doing it with deceased any so anytime i pick up a case in a quiet title or a partition lawsuit anytime i pick those up and there's deceased missing or incompetent people you have unknowns you have unknowns on how many people you're going to find i even had the unknown and the 40 defendants we didn't even know about 13 more until the title company sent us another document from a trust and all it took was another email so you know if you're in the game for this you have to expect the unexpected and i think that applies to cost and being you you have to you have to realize that the costs and the services to do these things are to help things later on down the road that you want to adopt your eyes and cross your t's get all your ducks in a row but you know i i always say when when you're getting in the game of those quiet titles or um even foreclosures i'm sure people have seen they could end up being three thousand six thousand nine thousand maybe you know uncontested even higher when you have those uh deceased people because you know guardian items in florida for doing those cases could be four hundred dollars opening the court file could be 400.

doing a newspaper publication is like um i've seen them go to a thousand dollars before just with four people on it so you're talking like cost alone ready 2 000 maybe 2 500. we haven't even talked about attorney's fees and costs we even even talked about service of process so my point is that you got to be in it you got to be in it to have a range you know so 5 to 15 000 could be you know 15 is probably a little high but still it depends on how many people and the timing timing could could depend on um whether the judge tells you to go back and go reserve whether they say go do the newspaper publication um whether your process server is taking uh a long time or can't find anybody um it could take a year um i've seen i've seen my fastest quiet title was 45 days during kovid but you know what guess what you both nailed it before they were alive right you know the the longest one that's ever taken me on a quiet title has been a year and two months because everybody was deceased and there were like nine kids 10 kids and one filed an answer you know never heard back a thing and of course that changes everything because now we've got to set it for hearing and um you know it just changed everything but the world of due diligence is important when it comes to all this stuff whether it's asking who the heirs are or even on the foreclosure side or quiet title side because you wanna you gotta get ever you gotta get as many people that are known that you can find so you can move forward i don't i totally greet you right but if i'm looking at ten assets right and two more deceased and one asset may have twenty thousand dollar balance on a loan and i wanna estimate my foreclosure costs in the situation i understand we don't know but if i'm looking at a twenty thousand dollar balance alone am i really gonna sit there and pay an extra five grand on top of the six for foreclosure and being into it for twelve grand on a twenty thousand note that's probably gonna sell at auction for you know 25.

maybe not but that's why i'm thinking that you look at it at a different angle of a real estate investment that way you're not spending that kind of money if you can find the heirs on a foreclosure or something like that if you can if you can find a way that you can actually buy the property and make that that person whole make yourself whole right so if you're buying that let's just say you're buying that note or or debt at 50 000 but you know there's a ton of more equity and now you're not only buying the debt as a first position you're buying the property yeah i mean so maybe that's the key on this whole situation right if we can buy deceased property deceased borrower's property from them from the heirs and remove our first position it's always a golden parachute yeah um but we're hoping that that person is confident and is okay i mean we're i have the deal whatever it is in alabama they're probably worth buck 70 right my balance is less than 30 on it so you know i'd love to go to there and listen i'll buy it and rent it back you for less than you're paying me a mortgage payment right but the problem is that i don't want you know a lot of stuff is i buy it to flip it right i don't want to rent it to the air i don't want to do anything i don't want to be the landlord on the situation however yes you're absolutely right because you know the borrower situation you know the air situation hey listen why don't you sell the property one sell to me right and make the deal happen and we go go away everything's good um but at the same time they can sell the property right sure they could they could absolutely you can line them up with a buyer and what i'm thinking david is you even if you're the one that's seeing it from an investment angle even if your first position you don't even have to keep it you can assign it out i mean that's what's crazy about it is signing it out and then you not only do you collect on your first position you collect on the assignment fee and now you just made more uh off that than you did holding it for five years maybe yeah yeah instant play for those are listening i definitely think that uh people are gonna start looking for you know estate sales and going all right facebook who is this person who is our kids right hey please don't go on social media and try to find people's hairs before you bought them please don't reach out to these people you don't own anything right um you can come at it the fact that you found out that there's a cease to the paper if you want to do that but if you're looking at a loan don't let anyone know that you are doing due diligence by reaching out to them because you're looking at a loan so because you did sign in non-disclosure when you did it yeah that's big oh you cannot violate privacy all that kind of thing yes yes no you there's no debt there's no nothing you don't know who the booker is you just want to buy the property you can go that direction and that's it al i know you're only in florida what is it does the laws change a lot from your understanding from state to state is there big wings of different information so i could say that i know a few attorneys in other states that go through probate um uh one is rilus dana he's in arizona and he's an attorney also in california and i actually just saw him in arizona for the first time when i was there and we were talking about timings of how long probate is there in california and he's like it could be 14 months 15 months and that's being generous uh on a probate in california and you know it sounds like arizona's got like a tiered system of like um what he what dan ryles calls mini probates and then probates and then different systems of like you know affidavits and different probates so apparently arizona is a really good state for probate also um so you definitely got to check out rylis he's all over social media and everything but even texas we've heard that texas apparently has a way that you can avoid probate if you have all of the heirs on board and they all sign an affidavit and a questionnaire and then therefore you don't have to go through everything so um i know nathan was talking about that on the show like blew my mind away about uh texas foreclosures i was like which you know this is this is fast stuff lethal this is fast stuff over there um so um you know there's a couple people that are doing uh you know interesting things in texas in that market but uh north carolina two i've heard that if it's been more than two years date of death that you can you don't have to go through the whole probate thing so every state is different when it comes to this you just gotta really connect with professionals that know what they're doing in that state that don't even just see probate they see the real estate too right like i don't look at it as just probate i see a closing i see a mortgage i see options i see weird and different stuff daily gotcha with that you know so probably if robin's coming in here that you know uh you could avoid probate in texas um but texas one of the worst when trying to find their heirs uh thank you robin yeah i can imagine uh especially with just what's going on in texas everything else there's a lot a lot of stuff going on there um cindy common on our linkedin feed that she had a wisconsin um probate with five errors and it costs about 3 500 um she foreclosed the time but the process took about 18 months and the holding hall cost killed her yeah so yeah yeah now you understand that why when i tell you probate's quick and it can be a faster process it's more worth it in in markets where you can do it faster yeah yeah so hopefully cindy you're able to you know maybe you didn't try the angle of breaking out the ears yourself and see if you can buy it but if you did please feel free to comment and and let us know because that's a definite a great angle if it's available um if you're stuck in that probate circle of what you've got to do and you can't sell a loan i can imagine the fact that not only the cost of the the probate but the holding cost of finding the errors serving them making sure the process is done but i'm sure kova didn't help at all there so um interesting it sounds like state to state's a big difference um is there a way for us to find out is there a kind of national guide to probate because foreclosure there is a you know the fannie mae special list of of course that we pulled out is there any way of doing it nationally to find out what the rules are from state to state are you aware of no but that's very interesting you brought that up i can almost imagine like uh i can almost imagine kind of like an uh an overview of what probate's like in other states but i i'm not that i've seen i think it's just a matter of really connecting with attorneys and probate and and um what what's going on in their states locally because um i've heard things in i've heard things in uh south carolina are it's another really really good market there but you know the creditor period there's eight months you know as opposed in florida's three months and then you know break down what you just said again because i i see some comments asking what that meant say that again what what's eight months so the um you know the the creditor period when creditors can make claims when when they do the newspaper publication in a probate um and i think in south carolina i think it's eight months if i'm not mistaken um but in florida it's three months so you know they get three creditors get three months once that newspaper's running they get three months to make their claim or they could be forever uh barred from making a claim that's a huge thing right because time frame i gotta look it up and see if we can figure that out because if one state's 12 months probably chicago right it's 12 months to find things out it may not be worth it to buy in that state when a deceased borrower if probate that time period of them responding is 12 months that's ridiculous that's a long time the whole pay property taxes corporate advances insurance yeah well here's the other thing is that when it comes to loans though there's security interests so they're not going away right if that's a security interest on that property that that's i mean at least in florida i mean that thing's gonna stick even five years uh even for four years even after that person died right so um that's not going away they can't sell that property without satisfying that mortgage so even if there is a creditor period when it comes to security interest though that's where having those documents recorded like plays a big role that's why mortgage companies have that right or or if it's a judgment lien the judgment liens get recorded right so that they try to sell even if it's been more than two years because you know fun fact david in florida creditors visa mastercard home depot comcast phillips and cohen's clients all these all these people that have claims have two years to make claims or forever they're out right but there's exceptions to federal tax liens mortgage security interest major improvements to the property what's a major improvement a security interest and or claim of lien right see there there's there's different ways that people secure their interest in those properties let me make sure i'm clear i understand what you said before the lender time period is that if if the lender puts out the fact that this we're looking for errors in florida and that air shows up four months later they don't have any room to move forward correct or is that different from my understanding other way around so it's in the probate it's when the airs are opening up the probate and the heirs are now initiating the probate process and then you know when they have to do the newspaper um and put any creditors on notice like mastercard and visa or any unknown creditors there's no unknown right that's the period of time to allow david and nathan on an unsecured debt to come forward and make a claim or you could be out is there any the way i'm talking there's anything out there that says you have 30 days to come forward if you have if you're in air possibility what is the time frame florida where we post out there can they ever show up five months later and say hey you know or five years later or something weird yeah yeah you're so you're you're what you're talking about is on the foreclosure side when you're doing due diligence to try to find those heirs um you know it's possible i don't remember what the exact time frame is but it's possible especially if they were out there and everybody knew that they existed maybe they can unwind it in some way but it may be too late by then um i think it just depends on timing and facts and circumstances about how they could have been found or what resources were out there to find them but you know what you want to do your biggest takeaway is there's two worlds right there's that foreclosure world which is the lender's diligence and trying to find heirs to move forward on a foreclosure then there's the probate world where probate is just going through the process of transferring what they had to the heirs so now that they can sell it you know convey it do what they want with it but now they got title to the property and in that probate if there's let's just say date of death is less than two years and there's known creditors we're doing formal notice to those known creditors and they get 30 days to respond or they're out so our brains are on on on different levels but but you can kind of see that there's kind of similarities to both worlds on searching doing due diligence whether it's for airs on the foreclosure side or creditors but moving the process forward on probate and it's and it's a lot easier than people think in the probate world interesting and and before we got on the call here we were talking about it's just been really busy for you just the last couple months it's just exploded and you and you're saying you see that continuing yeah 100 so you know last september october um you know well let me just first say today officially marks one year i've been on my own having left the firm so yeah today is the first day of of a brand new year two right and when i had first left it was it was busy it was you know it went through its waves but then sometime in september october last year i had like 15 calls in like two days um and then november picked up two december got quiet january got quiet but in the last two months it has exploded i have had probably about eight to ten meetings per day um with probates possible probates quiet titles crazy situations it has definitely the market's only getting crazier um i mean i'm also really good about you know how i'm out there and doing things so maybe that's helping too uh but at the same time i'm noticing there's a lot there's a lot of probates happening there's a lot of different things going on and i and like we were talking about i think this is only beginning with the amount of people that moved into florida in the last two years i think there's going to be um you know i talk about stats on my powerpoints and how you know a third of the market by 2037 is going to be like baby boomer probate properties all over the place well those were 2019 stats wow what does 2022 2023 stats look like is it gonna be like you know 40 45 yeah i don't know so we're we're heading into an interesting time in florida when it comes to people buying properties people moving here um you know they're they're from their other states they never had to go through this before it's going to be new experiences um it's going to be a different time i think a lot of things are going to shift a lot so a lot of a lot of room for opportunity so that's oh yeah and and just you know the more you know the more that you're educated the more you can you can start to see some of these opportunities coming up so that's that's pretty fantastic well yeah people buying land and now building on it instead of buying existing structures right so a lot of developers and builders may be just going after land now because if they know they have a construction company they don't need to buy existing and they can actually save a lot on the cost and uh the premium by building it themselves yeah huh that's fascinating a great topic to talk about it is interesting isn't it because i'm thinking about why is probate jumping up right now what is happening is the courts opening up more is it people just doing more things or people hiding dead bodies for a couple years like the prices are at an all-time high and i think that finally the the heirs that have been paying the taxes for 20 years 10 years five years they've realized number one they're done number two if they sell it now before interest rates go up and inventory increases they're gonna make a ton of money off that property or way more there's more people that are wanting to buy florida property than ever so i think the motivation is there more but now because of that they thought oh we've been doing this five you know 10 years uh we're good we're good it's like no you're not good you still got to go through this probate process because nobody took care of it beforehand so all these sitting properties that have never come to the surface that need these probates are coming there because now they're motivated to sell and didn't realize we got to go through it now yeah so we did a question um it was would you say not to worry about buying notes with heirs and how does someone find a good lawyer to help with the probate process in that state of the asset i presume you're buying you're working an attorney in that state that the property is located um how does someone go about finding an attorney that's a probate attorney for that state yeah as it relates to the notes and and whether good purchasing ones with deceased i think that all depends on your strategy i think that depends on your because because again the way i'm seeing it from that angle is the opportunity to try to buy that property as opposed to maybe uh getting in on the debt because again it doesn't get paid you have no recourse against those heirs at least in florida maybe it's different in another state but if they're not on the note no recourse against the heirs so you know how are you going to collect in the event that you you're not able to get your money for those who are not sure what we're talking about recourse um if an asset gets sold at the auction and you didn't get fully collected on your your balance alone and there's still money owed to you you can find you could file a judgment against whoever the borrower is or the person on the the judgment on it and you put judgment on them typically if a person has no money they're kind of judgment proof right so they're kind of stuck um so as much as we all talk about it not many people do it because there's lack of funding that person's foreclosed on because they can't afford anything so usually judgment doesn't really help but yes you could definitely follow jeff you know deficiencies on somebody who may have passed away and gave it to their rich brother who then owns this property and gets foreclosed on you can go after you put judgment on them um i've i've i've never done that have you ever done that no yeah no we're gonna do it in north carolina and i think we we followed something wrong i think a while back um just haven't yeah i i've used it to as leverage to kind of um yeah incentivize a borrower to cooperate yeah with a with foreclosure but that's the only time i've ever used it i'm that's not what i'm after you know that's that's not what i based my purchase on so it's not something i look at yeah cool well now uh before i let you go i know nathan we are discussing before the call so we kind of know a little bit of your answer here um but go ahead nathan yeah what do you see going forward here like we're talking a little bit about before about uh you know foreclosure tidal waves coming in and that kind of thing what's from from your perspective what do you see coming up where is the market heading yeah i think a lot of people are trying to find different angles to distress properties um instead of you know and going more direct to seller than ever um it's hard to say you know we don't know when the fed is going to raise the rates and how that's going to affect everything we don't know what the supply chain food chain supply is going to look like and how gas prices rising are going to affect things i mean if i had a guess it's it's going to have people spending less meaning you know maybe more inventory and maybe um maybe they're gonna have to shift their strategies to pay their loans instead of uh traveling around so much and remember when when gas prices go up airline prices go up so are people gonna be traveling wait a week to buy my tickets for we're flying out and they went from 200 to 700 and i'm like holy hey just because i was busy and i looked today i'm like oh my god i'm like do i just wait another week and hopefully it goes back down holy god yeah yeah by the way we're speaking it down we'll be speaking in vegas together me nathan um so i was i was buying my tickets last week got distracted yeah flying from uh philly to to vegas uh for up for um and for me and i was shocked at the price when i'm like i'm gonna wait a few days because it can't get much worse i mean can it right i don't know you never know um and actually that may be a steal 700 maybe a steal right now um you know that's kind of like how hedge funds are treating properties in florida they're like we'll pay a thousand right but they're paying a thousand because they know the top is 2 000.

i mean so you know there's there's so many things that are happening right now in the florida market and i think i've just noticed a lot of a lot of um areas that used to be they were hot now they're extremely hot and people are moving are trying to target areas that are going to be the next it the next place the next thing and they want to get more involved in probate they want to get more involved in figuring out these creative strategies around it because the the the ones that are creative and the weird are the ones that people don't want to touch yeah yeah yeah we look for hairy loans yeah we live on we live in those to make sure that like this right to see saloon is often something people avoid uh out of lack of knowledge like experience but i am curious about you know um looking up these kind of things and seeing when time frames are because that makes a big deal obviously texas is a golden state for everyone i think we all should bother the rules but on the flip side you know probate can be a problem it could be a hassle could be an issue or it could be absolutely nothing or it could be an opportunity and and yeah exactly different ways that that's the that's the thing is it could be an opportunity if you find all the airs you get all the errors and they want to you know be on board with selling the property or maybe um be on board with living in the property but agreeing to new terms right so or or agreeing to existing terms of a loan it just depends on what it is but you know pro my world i'm not you know in in the foreclosure world as much as you all are but in the probate world you know people are selling properties there's equity in the deals i've rarely seen short sales um especially lately i've really seen any type of short sale situation so um you know just there's tons of opportunities out there with probate cool fantastic well al uh awesome information a topic that i i we've never even touched upon and when nathan approached me last month about i was i was happy excitement because it's something i've always avoided due to lack of even in conferences appropriate's not spoken about this is something it's kind of you'll learn you'll talk to your attorney about it and it's just not spoken about for whatever reason um and reverse mortgages too right so i appreciate you coming on spend the time with us sharing your knowledge your experience and your your who you are um but feel free can anyone reach out to you is there a website you can give out or email us yeah so best way you can look me up www.alnicoletti.com and on my website i have my email address and my phone number so 904-999-0053 or my email address al a-l-al nikoletti.com and the best way to is if you're watching right now i'm on instagram attorney nicoletti follow me on instagram i drop content all the time uh find me on youtube under al nicoletti hit the subscribe button the bell when i get videos that are posting all the time and uh facebook that's a big one and my show the alan nicoletti show which is on itunes spotify and google play i go live wednesdays 8 p.m and i love it holy god it's crazy david oh the energy is awesome right i feel like this week i've been drowning so it's been good to see someone with some energy and you bring it back so we're gonna disconnect from the live fans we're gonna recap everything else guys i appreciate you jumping on here this will be back on youtube uh do all subscribe like button thingies you just said um and make sure you take it it will be on the podcast as well so uh if you aren't able to watch the video you'll find youtube linkedin instagram my gram whatever it is out there so it's cool so everyone have a good weekend hopefully everyone stays warm let me uh everything goes fine from there all right enjoy everyone thank you thank you you hey everyone dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me as always mr nathan turner how are you man very good very good awesome awesome so we're gonna bring out a few minutes but we want to catch up for a few minutes before we do that um be sure you can check out the replay for those who always ask on the youtube channel all the good stuff but nathan how are things been for you man back-to-back conferences and then getting back from that so a lot of catching up um which has been good um it's great when you've got the systems in place and you've got everything going and then it helps to get that ketchup done sooner than later which is really nice it's interesting because you know i wasn't away for the conferences which actually was a blessing in the skies things have been blowing up just little things here and there so it's been a little hectic but how was when you came back to the conferences did you feel rejuvenated did you feel different i did you know it's especially after being away so long i remember just before kovid i was i was getting tired and i'm like i'm not sure i want to even go to any more like i'm just i'm burnt out tired traveling it sounds fun it's just it's tiring and it it takes a lot of you know physical especially back to back yeah yeah so it but so i was i was relieved for a break there for a little while but uh but being back together with everybody and people i know and people i don't know and and uh you know getting information and everybody's kind of take on where we're at and where we're going and that's great it's good to be around you know like-minded people and just to be able to connect on that way yeah with you know the people there were they as our conversation in the past couple months has been about this economy where it's going all stuff did you get the same buy from those people that it there's something coming but they're not sure yeah a lot of discussion on that especially at the imn conference um with some of the the you know more macro looking people um a lot of discussion on that and and the general feeling is yes something's coming and it's just around the corner and you know how big of a corner is that is that you know six months is that 18 months who knows but uh but something's coming and then the other question is how big um you know somebody was saying tsunami and then other people are saying you know a bump and i just who knows anything in between so um i did make a post in the facebook group that i'd like to get into eventually i mean i'll talk later about there's some people out there selling these loans that are second musician loans they want to convert to first and just curious how people play it so if you have experience with that i'd love to see your thoughts on it if you can put into the facebook group and tag and understand that um if you've gone through that and you've been successful or you're the seller maybe you can clarify what that may mean and how that can look because that to me it's not comfortable um i'm hoping that you would pay off the first with the money and the link get released but i don't know so yeah that's it that's a little odd yeah you know i've i've bought a bunch of kind of odd loans in the past including like lease options and things like that but i've never heard of this that's that's a near kind of odd so like see how that would work right now we've um we're having a hard time right now buying assets right now we're having a lot of counties not able to record issues and problems um yeah we've gotten a pool of acid that we closed in on but the when we were looking through the collateral file or some things that were missing um so we're fixing them or the cell is fixing them but the recording is taking a while um i can buy it subject to but i want to make sure everything goes fine on that side before we do it um i don't want to do the hassle with it so are you running to that kind of stuff where it's been problem um not really actually i just recorded some stuff just electronically uh just yesterday in fact and and uh two different counties they came back you know within hours okay so that was nice and fast and easy cool um on the other hand i have other counties where i'm doing like an eviction or something that's taken forever and there's all kinds of backlog on that and that's that's you know it's frustrating we've been like two years paying nothing and now yeah we're having trouble getting him out it's what a pain so one of the things that i think i've steered away from in all these years is assets with um probate heirs i've dealt with them i've owned them i have a few right now that we're going through but it's something that i don't get into a lot just because of lack of knowledge lack of experience um and we want to bring al on nathan bring him on to the show to kind of talk about this right yeah nathan what's your experience with probate and heirs everything i've dealt with has been we've gotten away with it everything went well yeah me too it's been generally it's been okay sometimes a little bit more time consuming but yeah i'll buy loans all the time with a deceased borrower um generally because of my price point there is no will so we're having to kind of go through a process uh in fact i've got a couple like this actually down in florida before i met l but i know alex al's the expert on on all things probate so we wanted to bring him on and talk about what is probate and how does it work and and how do you take advantage of it so it's a shingle bringing along here is going to clarify a lot of stuff remember guys when we bring on people here it's not just for you guys to know we're learning doing this whole thing so how welcome to me nathan's show man appreciate you coming on david nathan thank you so much for having me i'm glad we were able to schedule this get it on the books yeah yeah it was crazy too because just two days ago uh nathan was on my show yeah and i was learning all about notes for the first time myself and i'm like i don't know anything about it i told the audience the same thing i said y'all i got no idea what this thing is about and let's we're gonna learn it today so i feel you when you when you talk about uh learning probate and what it breaking it down and learning all about it so just wanna say thank you both for having me you know going live with your audience and anybody that's out there that has questions you know drop your comment below and share it and maybe we'll have time to get to that funny we i've taught a lot of new investors and this was something i didn't understand when i first got into what do you mean an attorney doesn't understand the investment side they're attorneys they know everything and what you learned over time is they know how to be an attorney they don't understand the investment side they don't share how it plays in they had to work the deal on a legal side when it comes to anything else they're lost it the investment world is different right you know we could tell you about personal liability on a note a security interest and you know who can sign or maybe do the deal or the transaction at a closing but when it comes to how you can generate cash flow and generational wealth through note investing and through uh being in first position on on on a deal they don't teach you that in school they don't i mean you don't you don't even learn that in the first two three years you jumped into real estate like it's only when somebody presents you with an opportunity or a potential deal and they say hey we're not trying to buy the property we're actually trying to be in first position on that mortgage you're like what like what is this and that's when the reality sets that you know there's law and there's the legal world but then there's the investing world so um you know great point david about there's there's really two different worlds and and and it can help learning the legal world and seeing other people uh do the investing side so you can kind of see strategies and ideas but um definitely two different worlds yeah yeah so let's dive right into this yes what is probate for for those who are like i'm not afraid of probating what the word means right okay so basics um and and we can leave it to the real estate world but we can also bring it up in the brokerage account the bank account car world but the basic idea is somebody owned an asset let's just say they owned the real estate and it's in their name it's in that person's name only there's there's no magic language on deeds there's no two three four people um with magic language it's like let's just say there's somebody that owns a piece of property and their name and there could be other people on it but go with me on this right they own it they die now in order for that person's interest to transfer to the true heirs whether there's a will or no will there's a paperwork process that goes through court moving it over to the true heirs whoever they are that process is probate that process of moving the title of what that person had to those heirs is probate bottom line and then it where it gets interesting i'm sure is where there's no will and then there's several um potential errors and they get all in kind of you know some kind of a battle on who who gets what and how much and all that kind of fun stuff oh i got i got stories about that i mean i got i got power points for days on that um yeah you know the the wills you know wills and no wills and uh we can dive into that you know i'm only in florida for those that are watching so in the florida market uh wills don't avoid probate right a lot of people think that just because you have a will okay great now we don't have to go through that paperwork process you actually still do um and sometimes it gets trickier with wills because sometimes somebody will do a will and they won't just leave it to people they'll leave it to a trust um and then there's beneficiaries of a trust or sometimes they don't know where the trust is and it becomes crazy and wonky and how do you get around that or sometimes they'll in the will they'll leave it to five of the blood children and then one step child and now it throws everything off about you know what kind of probate how do you do this how do you overcome it and then of course you get people that say you know dad didn't want you to get it mom didn't want you to get that and then you get in a tussle with things so you know sometimes no will actually ends up being pretty much simpler sometimes um it can get messy when there's eight kids ever and the will should have left it to two or could have left it to three but you know because of nobel's eight kids and it can kill the deal um i i we can dive into stories but the the world of probate is a lot simpler and more streamlined than i think a lot of people have ever understood it at least in my world especially in real estate so what probate happens right we have people who pass away and they had things down and they go through the probate process for us as a lender what can we ask the borrower for to confirm probates happened and what should we collect to ensure that everything's in a row in the deal or what should what should we have as the lender have in our file to show the fact that this has transferred over um well one of the things you're looking for is the court orders right so the court orders in probate actually transfer over the interest and so once that order signed now the heirs have the title to the property and then technically they can do a mortgage with you or um some kind of note arrangement with uh the lender at that point because how how it's just like title insurance on a mortgage side do you even want to get into it if you don't know who all the errors are and that can back up your loan later in case of the default so the the order that you're looking for is that and then also you get these bigger probates sometimes where there's like the executor personal representative and sometimes they're able to either refinance or restructure the deal on behalf of the estate if it's beneficial right so um there's different there's different things along the way that you'd be looking for like those court orders um but ultimately the you can't really do anything until you get those so again another kind of wrinkle in our world is um let's say you know so the the borrower was on title and then passed away um still nobody's paying on that mortgage so do we have to wait until probate is done before we can even start a foreclosure no actually you could technically start the foreclosure um so that's a great question because i got asked that yesterday which was um can a bank move forward on a foreclosure even though the probate's not done right and the answer is yes they can it's just in the foreclosure you're naming the estate and then you're having an investigator do due diligence to try to find all potential heirs you know to try to serve them because now you're trying to extinguish them out of an interest or right that they have so you can move forward on a foreclosure um you're just naming the estate now in the meantime if all of a sudden one of the heirs came up and said hey we need to do probate no no we want to make sure that we have a buyer let's just say you all had the loan with with the deceased and let's just say they're able to procure a buyer who's going to make you a whole and they're going to make money off the transaction sometimes those are the best arrangements when you can potentially line them up with a buyer so you get the money uh back that you've paid all the principal and interest uh on on your loan i mean it's no different than a bank you know with a mortgage right you know you're doing that with your your notes and your your mortgages so um the other thing um that came to mind is uh you know some sometimes you may have a situation where you have that where somebody died and now the estate they want to honor the agreement maybe they want to honor the loan they want to keep it at the rate that you're at because maybe the interest rate you have off that note is good right let's just say it's at you know three percent but now the rates are going to four or five percent um and they want to maintain it maybe there's a way that in the probate they can appoint somebody to be the personal representative and maybe make that new arrangement with the new heirs or the estate so there's there's a couple different ways it can go with the mortgages what is the process to find all the errors and you know that's one of the other problems running two is where you're going through the process everything looks great you have you know three four errors that's it and then all of a sudden they come out of the woodworks right and you're like i gotta start over i gotta resell you know it becomes a process what is the process of finding air and how can they jump back in the middle of the process after you already served everybody so i've actually never seen a um a time in a probate where all of a sudden we've done a probate and then all of a sudden somebody pops out i've actually i haven't seen it to date okay um yeah and um i don't know maybe maybe it's the way i'm asking my questions uh that seems to get all the answers but you know we're we're always asking the heirs you know how many ever how many you know some some people want to say you know hey um we're interested in the probate you shoot me an email with your questions and i'm like no uh we're gonna do we're gonna do how many kids ever ever ev you know and it's like as soon as i start getting on the phone and really communicating we get answers right so not only is communication with them key um and drilling that down but even as you know when we send the documents to everybody if if there's somebody missing or there's somebody that's not supposed to be included they'll let you know right now in terms of your world with foreclosures that's what gets interesting right because you're shooting uh you're shooting in the dark when it comes to finding errors you're depending on an investigator or an affidavit of due diligence or some kind of uh document that's saying these are the potential heirs now and then you get a guardian ad litem guardian starts finding out more people that's when it gets trickier right because you've never talked to the source so the only thing that you could do in those kinds of cases and i've had i've had really good conversations with the investigator we use on quiet titles it's not only just doing a first degree search but a second degree search sometimes um you may be going a little overboard with second degrees because now you're starting to explain what second degree is for those who may not know not just not just immediate like spouse children but now you may be going like parents brothers sisters nieces nephews so just a little bit out in the family um because you never know maybe there was no spouse maybe there was no kids or parents or something like that um you know third degree and fourth degree going way down cousins and you know pre-deceased people maybe probably too crazy but yeah yeah and i'm just thinking in your world of foreclosures and doing due diligence right and because we see that in quiet titles we you know we have one right now where it's an adverse possession case and lady got title to the property more than seven years ago and she's been on a deed so she's got grounds to claim title to the property well come to find out we have to go back all the way to these 2-3 trusts and i have 40 people we're serving we serve 40 people and half of them are alive and half of them are dead and but here's the thing we did our due diligence to try to find them we found death certificates we'll do a newspaper publication you know and this is this is the world of not even probate this is the world of due diligence and searching and trying to find these people because i know you're i know where you're going with that yeah oh my lord yeah serving people i'm i've had that before where we thought we served everyone and then all of a sudden there was somebody else that we didn't serve or something like that or the court said no no you didn't serve properly and so we had to go back and do it all over again and it's a huge pain so if you can get it right the first time it saves you just a ton of time yeah and and people you know a lot of times the the lenders as clients to a law firm that's doing the foreclosure you know they're they're wanting to make sure that they're not overspending on costs right like you know these things get expensive sometimes the the filing and the service and all of it but at the end of the day when going through those those suits um doing that newspaper publication actually is really critical getting that guardian ad litem as the backstop is really critical and so sometimes spending the extra cost end up uh having a greater benefit later without having to go all the way back because if you have all these measures these these backstops um you can move forward on this and at the end of the day what are you supposed to do when you can't find anybody i mean right yeah you know you tried so the one that you mentioned there the newspaper publication i know we've done that in the past just to kind of clarify it is that is the newspaper publication trying to find a specific person or that's just a public notification and and if we can't find them then that will suffice as publication both so yeah so actually it could be both it's first of all the the reason we're doing is because we couldn't find somebody or or multiple people right we the process server tried going three four times finding all these addresses couldn't find them then we're doing a newspaper to that one person to put them on notice but then at the same time we're kind of doing it out in the world to say hey there's a cause of action here there's a foreclosure there's a quiet title speak now and come forward um but you know that that world is so different than probate like we that's a whole different world other than probate and you know we can get into that but probate probate is the is fascinating to me because a lot of people think it takes forever right they think it takes six nine months twelve months when i've done things in two weeks four weeks six weeks two months wow yeah yeah david's hearing that for the first time have seen everybody's face at the new view conference david when everybody when i was telling everybody the timings they're like what um and uh you know and so buyers are now not waiting forever they're not waiting forever on a deal which is the best part about it um but also the fact that so many of these heirs don't have the money to front to do the lawsuit right they or the the probate they don't have the money to do probate so where i'm able to jump in is waiting until the closing the hud settlement statement for payment so um the sa the same would be even if there was a refinance and they had to do a refi um and they were getting a cash out on the refi were you even able to wait until that settlement statement for for payment and that helps everybody because they wouldn't have been able to do the refinance they wouldn't have been able to do the sale without some kind of useful structure to these deals and i think that's been the model that's helped a lot of sellers go through these situations so you're talking two four weeks six weeks through probate and that's amazing right um is there something is the lender that we can do say we have an asset we have a bunch of assets right now that that a couple of them have some deceased people in there we're having a hard time get a hold of the heirs but they're paying the bill which is what it is we're happy about that but is there something from the lender side that we can kind of get caught up on and and is something i can do now to file it we're trying to find out they file probate limited information we're trying to find out if they do have errors who's there and what happened is there a way we can go get the court records get the information and what kind of you know find out if there's any other errors and how much does it cost to do this as a lender to find out the information so you know the public records in florida are beautiful because everything's out there you can go through the clerks of the court and find out if somebody's done a probate you can search by maybe last name first name and see if you'll see a case number like it'll come up in florida cp for probate circuit probate um you know it's it's it's out there um and i think one of the ways that you can find it is through those mediums and then um the other way is death certificates could be a great source because if if some if you know that the person died and maybe you have an uh a name and a a date of death there may be a way to pull the death certificate and see an informant that's named on the death certificate and that could lead you to a mailing address or a name and you can skip trace that name because somebody filled it out somebody filled out the death certificate right um so that that could be another way of potentially finding those errors in those situations um but other than that skip tracing genealogy uh reports like from a genealogist that aren't that expensive uh somebody that can perform a full skip of you know who people are and where they are those could be ways that you can find air so it's it can be really really helpful because that's a big thing right now is that if you're getting a list of assets and you see deceased right statement away from them yeah just because it's a little more hairy a little more issues we're saying now is that this may not be true and i just wanted to come and you know victor said victor wright just so low and uh sydney went through this coleman went through this during coven you know some of the posts are coming through i'm curious though from this point of view is that what you're saying is we where should we be careful with looking at assets what kind of gotchas are involved with this possibility of having a deceased person in dealing with that disease issue well it's also the fact that if you had the loan with the deceased person there's no recourse against the heirs so if you're trying to if if you don't know if you're going to make your money back off the foreclosure and there's going to be a deficiency judgment you're you're you don't really have that position to go after anybody for the deficiency because your loan was only with the deceased so um yeah and the other thing is if you're i don't know this just came through my head if you're finding assets or finding properties where there are these loans that are in the name of the deceased and they own that property let's just say it's florida they own that property that may be an investment opportunity actually because you can almost go in and see if you can help buy back buy that property and um that's almost like a level of a distress right so if you see that that's an indicator of a distressed or maybe motivated seller so not even just on the loan side to try to make money off the interest rates and payments but on an investment side on the property could be good because imagine imagine somebody had that loan for 20 years and they've paid it down all the way to owing 50k off on that loan and really the arv on the property is 350.

oh my gosh i mean so you're actually in a really good position plus you don't know what kind of repairs and what kind of value you're willing to offer but what's what's the risk when you're able to just pay down 50 plus an additional up to the point where you would do rehab um those could be sweet deals on an investment opportunity so um that's how i see it from my brain you know on on the lending side of it um it's quite interesting because you just got to try to get in touch with those heirs too yeah that's really interesting because it's it's not uncommon where i'll see on a list of loans to purchase it'll be in you know a state of uh or sometimes i even buy um reverse mortgages with deceased borrowers um which i know a lot of people look at that and that's kind of hairy as well but but with the deceased borrower thing isn't necessarily a deterrent because there is a process set up to kind of navigate that and to help you to figure out how to approach that and it doesn't always necessarily have to end in foreclosure either and that's usually when i look at it in a state of name my assumption is that we're going to go to foreclosure and that may be true but if we can do a probate and work something out with the heirs uh maybe not it doesn't have to be a foreclosure yeah we're trying to do mods right that's where our plan is to do mod put this thing or you know assumption if we can do assumptions yeah you know but that's the angle here right but like nathan said we never really talk about this stuff so deceased borrower is like oh i'm gonna have to go through probate i'm gonna have to go through the process the heirs i have to work for people and they give to the foreclosure you have the mail letters away and mailed to these people they have 30 days to respond and it becomes a more of an add-on process but what you're saying here is it's not as big of a deal it's just something different that we're used to it's outside the box typical stuff that we shouldn't be afraid of it i think if you frame it in a different way where you're looking at more of a investment opportunity um maybe on the real estate end that's when it could be interesting and nathan you had me interested at the fact that purchasing reverse mortgage notes yes yeah it's it's really interesting there's there's a whole that's a whole like niche on its own and i'm curious why they even would be for sale um because those payoffs can be huge and they really put everybody in a tough position because there's there's such large payoffs and the interest rates on reverse mortgages are are i mean they i remember i still remember one of the first one of the first probate cases i picked up when i started all this like consistently um was the the beach property where there were these four uh children ever and one of them was a holdout living in the property but you know at the time they saw me the mortgage payoff was 425 and the property valued uh you know that anybody was able to want to buy it at was like 500 525 okay and i told them i said you got to move fast you got to move quickly because those reverse mortgages add up well though they couldn't get the one hold out to get out of the house eight months later they wanted an updated payoff and it was 4.85 and um so you know that's kind of interesting about about being able to buy you know i guess buy those out of even a discount um i wonder what the lenders are seeing there is the opportunity to get out you know typically it goes to the street foreclosure right it's more of a straight foreclosure play they don't want to wait 12 months because obviously there's not going to be any debate about it and robin mentioned that be a good topic for us to bring up but it's typically a foreclosure play right you're hoping that someone comes along and they work it out and they sell the property but the meantime they're not there's stock situation where you're gonna have to foreclose and go through the process because you have no one to deal with yeah yeah i think that's deceased borrower you're pretty much always looking at a foreclosure but maybe not yeah i mean and again maybe looking at it from an investment opportunity if you're able to buy that first position at a discount and you're able to see if there's equity in that property and then you can flip it and do something with it um maybe maybe you arrange it in some way with that and then you still say stay fi....