What People Are Saying About Rent-to-Own:
“Thanks for the home you sold us, Wendy. If it weren’t for this technique, and your help, we would have probably moved in with parents or been crammed into an apartment. Our credit was shot and we needed a chance to rebuild it before we could get a mortgage. We love our home and are thrilled it worked out for us. Now we are home owners! Thanks!”
~ Mike and Dorian K.
“Wendy I want to personally thank you for allowing my family to have a home, without the lease option we felt that we were simply living in a house. Now we feel the true warmth of our home and we could never thank you enough.”
~ Sincerely, Karen Greene
“As a new college graduate entering the home market, I couldn't get a mortgage to buy a house. Instead, I rented to own, eventually buying the property when my job and credit history allowed. With today's ‘credit crunch’ this strategy has become even more timely, and Wendy Patton shows you the best ways to start on the path to home ownership. All the pros, all the cons, and what you should know BEFORE you sign the contract are right here. This book is required reading for anyone even thinking about renting to buy.”
~ Vena Jones-Cox, Owner of RealLifeRealEstate.com
“We’ve known Wendy Patton for years and she’s one of the best at creative financing. Rent-to-Own is a timely book designed to help aspiring buyers and the agents who support them find a solution in a tough market.”
~ Gary Keller, Co-Founder of Keller Williams Realty and best-selling author of The Millionaire Real Estate Agent and SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agent Tackle Tough Times.
“Wendy Patton has come out with another masterpiece. Her reputation as an investor and educator is stellar and any book she writes you must read. Whether you are a first time homebuyer looking for a great deal on your personal residence or a full time investor looking for a great way to acquire more properties this is a must read. Right now the real estate market is a perfect storm for what Wendy teaches you in this book.”
~ Than Merrill, Star of A&E’s “Flip this House” and Founder of FortuneBuilders.com
Rent-to-Own
How to Find Rent-to-Own Homes NOW
while rebuilding your credit.
By
Wendy Patton
Featuring Dozens of Ideas to Rebuild Credit
While Buying Your Dream Home
Copyright 2014 Wendy Patton,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2306-7
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all of the buyers in North America that want to buy their first home or next home, but just can’t do it. Unfortunately, the mortgage industry has changed along with the economy. It is affecting and squeezing everyone in our country. I congratulate you for picking up this book and researching how you can be a home owner in the near future. Home ownership is within your reach if you really want it.
I want to give special thanks to so many people that helped me with this book. Kathleen Woodward, Thanks for helping rewrite this book! To my husband, Michael, who has to put up without me during the years I spent writing books. I appreciate you so much.
To Your Success
Wendy Patton
INTRODUCTION
Let me paint a picture for you. You either owned a home previously or you are a first time buyer. If you owned a home previously you might have lost it to foreclosure, shortsale, either due to a job loss, divorce or your mortgage rate adjusting upwards.
Now is the time to buy! For most of us, home ownership is our single, biggest source of wealth. It not only puts a roof over our heads that we can call our own, but it also builds security for our futures by paying down the mortgage and building up equity. For most people, their home is their single greatest asset.
Probably the first thing you did was to start looking on the Internet or checking the local newspaper for homes for sale. After that, you called a Realtor® and he told you that he would love to help you, but you needed to get approved for a mortgage first. Ugh…you know you don’t have the best of credit and you are not sure if you should even call a mortgage lender.
You decide to make the call to a mortgage lender. You know what the outcome will most likely be in advance, because of your financial situation, but you do it anyway. After gathering tons of information from you all the way down to how many times a week you floss, he finally tells you that based on your current credit, income, down payment, inadequate amount of time spent brushing after meals, etc. you aren’t currently qualified to get a mortgage. Well, duh! You could have told him that in the first place. Do not despair.
Whether you owned a home before that was foreclosed on, you were a renter or you are a first-time buyer, chances are if you are reading this you have already experienced the above scenario, or at least something close to it.
The problem is that at the same time, rents are high in many areas of the country as the demand for rentals has increased. How much money do you want to continue forking over each month in rent only to pay the landlord’s mortgage? You want to BUY a home. That’s why you’ve been looking, and why you are reading this book.
Most people would give up here, despite the increasing rents. After all, if you can’t get a mortgage, you can’t buy a home, right? But we both know you aren’t most people. You have taken the step to educate yourself by buying this book. The banks want you to forget that there are ways to buy homes other than just getting a mortgage – you DO have options. Heck, even if you CAN qualify for a mortgage right now, you might be looking for another option just to give yourself some leeway in this difficult housing market. This book is all about giving you another option, a way to get into your new home now, even if you can’t qualify for the loan yet.
What this is, of course, is a guide for buying your next home without having to have a mortgage right away, without having to have perfect credit and without having to have a large down payment. This is a guide to a creative home buying technique known as “rent-to-own” or “lease-option.”
You might be thinking that because you can’t qualify for a mortgage right now you will only be able to get a rent-to-own home from the most desperate sellers with the ugliest, most over-priced house. While it’s true that those are going to be some of the homes available on a rent-to-own basis, you’ll be happy to know that they are far from being the only ones. It’s also possible to buy homes in excellent condition, even fully renovated homes or new construction,
