Interesting Mortgage Fraud Series in the Sarasota Paper
Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:18 am
Week long series documenting an investigation they've been doing for the past year. It follows on the heels of earlier investigations by the Miami Herald and St Pete Times that documented that convicted felons were allowed to get real estate licenses during the bubble years and that drug dealers were using real estate flipping to launder drug money.
The whole series is worth reading this week, but I'll excerpt one part. Hey, these guys were just in the business of making money, amirite?
http://www.heraldtribune.com/
The whole series is worth reading this week, but I'll excerpt one part. Hey, these guys were just in the business of making money, amirite?
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090721/ARTICLE/907211055As part of the Herald-Tribune's year-long investigation into property flipping fraud, the newspaper interviewed Adams' former business partners and analyzed land deeds, mortgage documents and other records related to his real estate deals. The investigation found that for more than a decade, Adams used a network of professional associates and a stable of regular buyers to control every aspect of his real estate flips.
Instead of selling properties to outside buyers, he created a real estate market where his hand-picked buyers and sellers could set the price they wanted, and repeated flips made Adams hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate sales commissions.
In some cases, Adams and his associates bought a house, marked up the price and quickly sold it to another associate for more than it was worth. Using the inflated sale price, they qualified for a mortgage that more than covered the actual purchase, then divided the remaining cash among themselves, according to seven people familiar with the deals.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/
