WARNING Strictly for Christchurch Homeowners Only Don't spend any money repairing your house until you have read this report How To Sell A Tired and Rundown House! The ultimate guide for anyone who wants to sell a tired or rundown house as is for a fair price without paying real estate fees or legal fees even if the front lawn is shoulder deep in noxious weeds and littered with old car bodies PO Box 22 148 CHRISTCHURCH Phone: (03) 387 0149 Fax: (03) 383 9098 Email: info@propertysolutions.net.nz www.propertysolutions.net.nz Christchurch Property Solutions Ltd trading as Property Solutions
Dear homeowner If you want to sell a tired or rundown house without spending lots of time and money fixing it up this may be the most important message you will ever receive. Here s why. Selling any house in today s tough property market is not easy. Selling a tired or rundown house to picky buyers who want a perfect house can be extremely difficult if not impossible. Does this mean you can t sell your house for a fair price unless you spend thousands of dollars fixing it up? Not necessarily. There s a very good chance that if your house is suitable I will want to buy it as is. Here s what this means for you. I will buy your house exactly as it is right now. This means you can sell your house and leave all the repairs and work and the stress to me. Plus you can leave any of your stuff that you don t want behind and I ll pay someone else to take it away at no cost to you. Here s what I do. I buy tired and rundown and houses that need fixing up. Then I fix them up and resell them for a modest profit. Sometimes I don t have the time or the resources to fix up all of the houses that are offered to me. This doesn t mean I can t buy your property. It just means I won t do the work myself because I also buy houses for a big group of property investors who don t have the time to find properties for themselves. This means if your property is suitable I will buy it and fix it up myself or I will buy it and pass it on to another property investor. Either way you will have sold your house and you can forget about all of the work and the cost of fixing it up. You can move on with your life. You won t have to pay any real estate fees or commissions or legal fees. You won t have to pay thousands of dollars in real estate fees, commissions and marketing costs if I buy your house because there are no real estate agents involved. Plus I will pay your legal fees up to $1050. This means you can keep all of the money from sale of your house without having to share it with real estate agents and lawyers who often get paid a lot of money for doing very little. I can pay cash because (unlike most other buyers) I use private funds and I don t have to get a mortgage or sell another house so I can buy your house. 2
The easiest way to show how I buy tired and rundown houses is to tell you about other people who have sold me their houses without having to fix them up. In some cases I have changed the names and anything that might give a clue to the identity of the homeowners to protect their privacy. Other than that these are true stories. Here goes. Here s what Leanne Wilson said after I bought her house. Property Solutions made selling our home a fast and easy process. We were able to sell our home quickly so we could go to Australia. They could not have made selling our house any easier. They gave us a good deposit because we needed some cash urgently and we were able to stay in our house until the day we left for Australia. I recommend Property Solutions to anyone who wants to sell their house fast and without any hassle. 3 Leanne Wilson, Christchurch Mark was one of the worried homeowners who came to me for help. This is what he told me. I was too scared to answer the phone or go the front door in case it was someone asking for money. I left the mail in the letterbox so I wouldn t have to open the bills or read the letters demanding money. Mark was only weeks away from a mortgagee auction. I first met Mark after he replied to one of our ads in the newspaper. This is Mark s story in his own words. I was happily married with a lovely daughter. We were living in our dream home. Life was good. Or so I thought. Until I came home from work one day and the house was empty. No wife. No little girl. No furniture. Just a note saying my marriage was over. I felt like I had been smashed over the head with a cricket bat. I kept going to work every day because I did not want to stay in an empty house by myself. This went on for weeks. One day I came home from work and found my daughter sitting on the front doorstep with her suitcase. My wife had just dumped her there and taken off. I was pleased to have my daughter back even if things would never be the same
again. After I had settled her into her room I got on the phone to my parents and arranged for some help while I sorted things out. Finally I rented my house and moved in with my parents. My tenants paid the rent at the start but after a couple of months they just stopped paying. When I went to the house to sort things out they had gone. The house was a total wreck. I couldn t rent it in that condition and I couldn t pay the mortgage unless it was rented. So I stopped paying the mortgage. Eventually after a number of letters from the bank a really serious letter arrived. It was a default notice. The bank was giving me 4 weeks to make up the arrears on my mortgage or it was going to sell my house. My Dad came up with a possible solution. He had cut an ad out of the local paper. I had nothing to lose I rang the number in the ad and spoke to a guy called John Ellerm. He seemed ok on the phone. He asked a lot of questions about my financial position and the house. That s when things started to get better. To cut a long story short John Ellerm and Property Solutions paid up the back mortgage payments to give me some breathing space and agreed to buy my house. I was off the hook. Some time after I had helped Mark I had a call from a Russian gentleman named Ivan (Ivan is not his real name). Ivan was in a pretty bad way. He thought he had sold his house for $210,000 but the buyer had backed out at the last minute because it failed a building inspection and needed a lot of money spent on it. Ivan called me and I went to see him. Here s his story. Ivan had been living in Christchurch for about 2 years. He did not have a job and his only income was from a fishing boat he owned in Canada. It must have been a pretty good boat because it was giving him an income of more than $100,000 a year. His biggest problem was he would have had to leave New Zealand if his income stopped. Anyway long story short the fishing company that was leasing the boat had gone bankrupt and the boat had been seized by the harbour authority because of unpaid dry-dock fees of just under NZ$10,000. They were going to sell Ivan s boat to recover their money. Ivan was beside himself with worry. He was going to use the money from the sale of his house to pay the dry-dock fees and save his fishing boat. He asked me to buy the house for $210,000. I did my homework and checked all the other sales in the area. As it turned out I could not afford to pay more than $200,000 because of the cost of fixing it up. I asked Ivan if saving his boat was more important than getting top dollar for his house. He said Yes. 4
Here s what happened next. Ivan agreed to sell me his house for $200,000 and I agreed to give him $10,000 immediately. Then I went to my bank and got the cash and paid it over to Ivan s solicitor. At the same time Ivan and I signed a sale and purchase agreement for me to buy his house for $200,000. Ivan sent the money to Canada and saved his boat and more importantly his income. Ivan was so happy he cried. I was happy too. I had bought a house for a fair price and I eventually made a small profit after I had completed all of the repairs and re-sold the house. My next story is about a husband and wife team. Peter and Irene called me after their rental property had been badly trashed by their tenants. I met them at their home and they told me that they wanted to sell their rental property because Peter was very sick and did not want to be bothered with tenants anymore. They just wanted a quick cash sale without having to fix up the place. I have seen a lot of properties in a pretty bad state but this was a beauty. The tenants had kicked holes in the walls, spilled red wine over the carpet and the house smelled like a sewer because the toilets were blocked and there were piles of garbage all through the house. To make matters even worse. The freezer was full of fish and the power had been turned off because the tenants had not paid the electricity bill. And the weather had been particularly warm. You can imagine the smell. It was very, very bad. This house was definitely not going to have queues of pretty house buyers lining up to buy it. I had a good look at the property and worked out that by cleaning it up and fixing up all of the damage I could afford to pay $210,000. Considering the terrible state of the property I thought this was a very fair price. I went back to the owners of the property and made them an unconditional cash offer for $210,000. They turned me down flat and said their absolute rock bottom price was $220,000 because they needed the money to pay for Peter s medical costs. Where to now? Peter and Irene wouldn t budge on $220,000 and I couldn t afford to pay more than $210,000. It looked very much like they couldn t sell their trashed house they desperately wanted to get rid of and Peter would have to wait for his treatment. 5
Here s what I did:- I went back to the owners and said:- Peter and Irene I would like to buy this property but I can t afford to pay more than $210,000 for it if I have to pay all of the cash immediately. Here s what I can do. I will give you the $220,000 you want if I can give you $20,000 today and the other $200,000 in 4 months time. Plus I will pay your mortgage payments for the next 4 months and your legal fees. In return I want unrestricted access to the property so I can clean it up and fix all the things that need fixing at my cost and then I will put the property on the market. If I can sell it before the 4 months is up I will pay you the $200,000 I owe you immediately. Otherwise I will give you the $200,000 balance at the end of 4 months. My offer was accepted immediately because Peter and Irene had their asking price and they did not have to make any further mortgage payments or spend any more money fixing up a house that was making their lives absolutely miserable. Peter and Irene had a win because:- Peter could get better without having to worry about bad tenants or fixing up the property. They got full asking price even though they had to wait 4 months for most of it. They didn t have to make any more mortgage payments because I paid them. If they had listed it with an agent they would have to make at least 2 or more mortgage payments while they waited for the house to sell. They didn t have to pay any legal fees. They didn t have to spend a lot of money fixing up the property. They didn t have to pay any real estate fees because they were dealing directly with me. I had a win because:- I could move in immediately and start fixing up the property. I didn t have to tie up a lot of cash or take out a mortgage on the property. I could use the cash to buy another property. If I decided to keep the property as a long term rental I could raise a mortgage at the fixed up value rather than the purchase price. (This is a big advantage for investors.) Or I could sell the property before I had to pay for it if I could fix it up and find a buyer inside the 4 month period. (I sold it after 3 months and paid the balance early.) If they had accepted my original offer of $210,000 they would have got a lower price but they would have got their money immediately. Strange as it may seem I was far happier paying the higher price and getting the time to fix the house than if the owner had accepted my original offer of $210,000. 6
Even if your house is not suitable I will still help you if I can. Here s how I helped Daniel and Annette. 7
I was able to help Charlie and Elaine Reid because even though there house was not suitable for me I introduced them to very good real estate agent who got them $20,000 more than they were hoping for in a very short time. Here s what they said after their house was sold. 8
Here s an article from the Press newspaper about me dated 11 August 2010. Mr fix-it targets derelict properties By SHANE COWLISHAW - The Press Last updated 05:00 11/08/2010 KIRK HARGREAVES/The Press FIX-IT MAN: John Ellerm has bought and fixed up about 100 Christchurch houses in the past eight years. Derelict and run-down Christchurch houses are being bought and restored by a self-described property "problem solver". John Ellerm has been buying old houses and fixing them up for the past eight years, often offering them to people on a rent-to-own basis. His company, Property Solutions, advertises for houses that owners are having difficulty selling or renting because of their poor condition. Ellerm said he offered a hassle-free option for people who needed a quick sale. He recently bought a Spreydon duplex and had spent $10,000 clearing backyard junk. "A place like this, the best real estate agent in the world is not going to get rid of it," he said. Ellerm said he had bought and fixed up about 100 houses over the past eight years, but usually considered 10 to 15 houses before buying one. 9
He needed to make a "modest profit" from buying the house, but he always told an owner what he planned to do with the site. "I solve people's problems... if they've got a problem [with what I'm doing], I tell them I'm not the right person. Most of the people are relieved to be out of the situation they're in." Real Estate Institute of New Zealand director Bryan Thomson said private property dealers and developers had been around for a long time in various forms, but did not have to provide proper valuations like agents. They were not governed by any rules like registered agents. "The biggest thing I would say is if people are looking to sell their property and deal with this, they need to be sure that they know their property's worth." That s about it. If your house is suitable I will make you a fair offer to buy it. If it s not suitable I will try to find some other way to help you get your house sold. Here s what to do next. Call my office on 387 0149 and tell me about your house. Or text me on 021 359 085 and I ll give you a call. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by picking up the phone and giving me a call. If you need more information or if you have any questions I m only a phone call away. Call now 387 0149. Or Click Here and fill in our Fast Response Form with the details about your house. Kind regards John Ellerm John Ellerm Christchurch Property Solutions Ltd PO Box 22 148 Christchurch Email: Click here and get in touch with us by email. 10
Action Response Form Yes John I want to find out how I can sell my tired and rundown house. I want to find out what kind of solutions you can put together for me. I ve read your report, I found what it said very interesting, and I want to sell my house. I m sick of owning it, I ve had enough, and I want to move on. I do understand that you need to know some facts about me and the house before you can do anything, so I m going to fill this sheet out in its entirety and FAX or POST it to you. I know that if I m not totally satisfied with the solutions you give me, I m under no obligation to sell. But I sure don t have anything to lose by just talking to you. And who knows, you may buy my house! Name: Address: Phone: Day Evening Property address: Are the loan(s): Current? Behind? Amount: $ What are you asking for the house? $ If I Ire to have the house valued, what do you think it s worth? $ When would you like to have the cash in your pocket? Does the house need repairs and what are they? Have you done any major repairs or renovation in the last 5 years? How long have you owned this house? How many bedrooms and bathrooms? What is the approximate square footage? Why are you selling? What kind of construction? Anything else you want to tell us - GREAT! That wasn t so bad was it? If you have made it this far, and still have pen in hand, I know you are serious about selling your house. I d love to talk to you about it right now, but I need to review the information you just wrote down. To get it to us quickly, FAX this sheet, fully completed, to (03) 383 9098 or post it to: Property Solutions PO Box 22 148 Christchurch I ll be looking for it, and I ll call you back promptly. 11