The first house I ever bought creatively, I barely negotiated at all. It was 2016, I was pregnant with my second baby, and I’d been looking at houses for about six months without buying a single one. Then I found one that made sense. I gave the seller pretty much what he was asking for, and in return he financed the whole thing for me at zero percent interest for a year, nothing down. No bank. No big pile of cash. I just figured out what the seller actually wanted and gave it to him. That was my first real taste of creative deal-making, and it changed how I saw this whole business.
Most people think there’s only one way to buy real estate. You save up, you go to the bank, you put twenty percent down, and you cross your fingers that you qualify. That’s fine for your first house or two. Then you hit a wall. The bank caps how many loans you can have, your down payment money dries up, and you sit there watching good deals go by because you can’t fund them. Creative finance is how I got past it, and it’s what I’ll walk through in the morning session.
Let’s talk about what I mean with creative finance. Master leasing is when you control a property and rent it out without ever owning it - you lease it from the owner with the right to sublet, and you keep the difference. Subject-to is when you buy a house and take over the payments on the loan that’s already there, instead of getting a new one. A lease purchase is a rent-to-own setu ... Read More…