Lease Option Pitfall Number 2
Not getting a proper title search against the property is Pitfall number two. This has happened to me with one of my students.
We did a title search and it said the title was in the name of one person, the occupant. This man wanted to do a lease purchase with an assignment. He had just gone through a divorce.
Now even though the title search came back with a clean report, we found out that the divorce decree said that the occupant needed to sell the property and not lease. His wife was still on the mortgage as a joint mortgage borrower.
So we had to get written permission from the wife.
There’s always lots of surprises with title. The lesson learned is if we saw that there were two people on the mortgage documents, we needed to investigate whether or not the one person that was on the title can actually lease or sell the property.
