Who Buys Fire Damaged Houses in Memphis

Why the Gap Is Where It Goes Wrong

Once you have agreed terms you stop taking other calls, and a buyer knows it. If a civil action is running about the property, it does not pause because a contract has been signed, and hearings continue on the court's timetable rather than the closing's.

So the weeks between agreement and completion are the period in which an owner has the least leverage and the most exposure. The framework is on our page covering the private right of action.

What Should I Have Agreed Before That Period Starts?

The Buyer Who Goes Quiet

The commonest failure. Communication drops off after agreement, questions take days, and you find out about problems late because nobody told you early.

It is rarely malicious. It is a buyer who has moved you into a queue. It matters here because it is precisely the period in which you should be hearing about anything that has changed on the docket.

What to agree in advance: a named person and a check-in interval, however brief.

The Buyer Who Starts Renegotiating

Arrives as a discovery rather than as a demand. Something has come up, the timetable has slipped, the number needs revisiting.

Sometimes genuine. The test is whether the thing discovered was knowable at the outset. A live court file is a matter of public record, so a buyer who agrees a price and then reduces it on learning about a proceeding they could have searched for is repricing their own diligence failure onto you.

How Do I Protect Against That?

The Buyer Who Wants to Get Involved

Offers to attend a hearing with you, to talk to the plaintiff, to arrange a meeting with the nonprofit. It sounds like help.

You are the party to the proceeding and they are not, and a purchaser acting in a matter that determines the value of what they are buying is in a position no seller should permit. Information is fine. Involvement is not.

The Buyer Who Keeps Telling You Not to Worry

The subtle one, and it usually comes from somewhere well-meaning. Reassurance that a hearing is a formality, that the case will resolve itself, that attending is not really necessary while a sale is progressing.

The reported route by which Memphis owners have lost property runs through not appearing. Any buyer whose reassurance points toward attending less is offering you the one piece of comfort that has actually cost people houses.

Contract Assigners

Some parties sign to buy and sell the contract on before closing, which stretches exactly the period this page is about. The eventual purchaser inherits a proceeding they were never part of assessing, and the gap gets longer.

The question that catches it: which entity will appear on the deed. A principal buyer gives you a name you can search in the same records.

What to Keep Doing Regardless

Attend everything. Whatever is agreed with any buyer.

Keep your own lawyer. Not the buyer's, and not nobody.

Check the docket yourself. Public, free, and it means you are not relying on a counterparty to tell you about your own case.

Keep the building secured. A condition that worsens during the gap gives everyone a reason to reprice.

Where We Fit, and Where We Do Not

We buy as principal, in our own entity, with our own funds, and we take title. We do not assign contracts. Ask us what we commit to during that gap and the answer should be specific rather than reassuring.

We are frequently not the right answer. In Midtown and across much of the suburban ring, where the frame came through and values carry the work, a rehabber or an owner doing the work will beat us, and repairing is also what abates any action. Our written figure says so when the numbers point there. What happens from there is on our page about how the process actually runs.

Questions About Buyers