You know that story about the employee who buys an expensive hat and tries to expense it on his business expense report? His boss returns it to him and says that is not an allowable expense. And so the next month, the employee submits another report, and tells his boss to find the hat. The boss looks and looks and can't find it, as all the expenses are allowable, and reluctantly he approves the expense report.
Well we kind of know a little more about what that's like. The house has no history, so we are piecing things together. And a big piece fell into place with the preliminary title report that traced back 2+ years with deed changes.
We know that the Andersons owned the place for a lot of years until the last of the elder clan passed sometime around 2006. It was resold to the Camarillo family and probably they were the ones to do all the beautiful and high end renovations, new electrical, new attic room, some extensions downstairs to add another bedroom. They unfortunately lost it to foreclosure sometime in 2009.
And now we know what happened after that. BofA foreclosed and it was trustee deeded over to Reconstruct Company, N.A. We guess that the remaining repairs, paint, finishing up the kitchen remodel, etc, were done by them. They trustee deeded it over to BofA in February 2012 and BofA turned around and sold it at auction to Alpine Holdings Inc and that was recorded on May 11, 2012. They put it on the market on May 24, 2012, and we bought it.
Some research turned up an interesting triangle. The Reconstruct Company is 100% wholly owned by Bank Of America, so essentially BofA kept possession but took it off their books as a liability. BofA could then get the insurance payment from AIG for the foreclosure for 80% of the home loan value. Reconstruct hung onto it a while and did their thing with improvements and "sold" it back to BofA which BofA then sold to Alpine Holdings to market it.
The owner's name was on the docs so it was easy to find out that he is a Chico State Univ marketing student about my eldest son's age (30) who has holdings in excess of $50Million. The Alpine Holdings LLC is just one of quite a few LLCs of which he is acting President, and all in the business of quick flips - but only on the marketing side. Fifty million in assets doesn't happen without someone fronting the money or at the very least underwriting the business with an open checkbook. Like BofA, for instance.
The house has forced amnesia. It has been intentionally cleansed, so the bank profits at each juncture and no disclosures need to happen. Records of improvements are long gone, that was two sales ago, and all between BofA and the companies they control. That is why the *current* owner Thomas Christy can scrawl across the disclosures pages -- SELLER NEVER OCCUPIED HOME. They don't have any information on the house because the deeded transfer was so recent. And all totally legal.
We approached the home with caution. We have paid over $2K in inspections, well and water test, septic and leach fields, home inspection, termite / dry rot. But I wonder had another buyer relied on the seller's disclosures to learn about the property, what they would be thinking with the non-disclosure disclosures. What a risk it would be to buy a home without history.
I was interested in this trustee's deed transfer because the process essentially cleanses the foreclosure to a non-foreclosure even though the bank still owns it. If this is going on all over the country, that might mean the statistics of our economic recovery are being manipulated by the banks and we aren't in the kind of shape that is being reported to Congress and the President.
While not illegal, it does perpetuate the mindset of manipulation for personal gain the banks continue to do in spite of the economic whirlpool it has caused. It explains why our sellers are disinterested in promoting the close, and why our agent is running around like her hair's on fire to get everything done. This is one house among thousands of others they have never stepped inside but are representing as a seller. And my hunch is that BofA will get most of the profits from the sale after Alpine Holdings funnels the cash through its LLC.
Trying to put a dollar figure to this one transaction is hard, but my guess is that BofA foreclosed on a $385K mortgage (so AIG paid BofA 80% of the loss, or $308K). Reconstruct sold it back to BofA for $65K. BofA then sold it to Alpine Holdings for $102K. And now we are buying it for a profit to them of $120K. $530K profit, $65K as a write off.
Not a bad day for the bank.
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