We were unable to sell a vacant single family home, rental property although it had been on the market for a while. This house was in pristine condition and the only reason it was hard to sell was it's size. It was two bedrooms but only 700 sq feet. Rather than rent it out again while it was for sale, we heard an ad on the radio for Investment Properties International, a company that finds rent-to-own tenants, manages the property by taking care of the mortgage payments, any repairs and finding qualified tenants.
We signed a 2 year "contract" with Judy Knecht after being assured that everything would be taken care of for the next two years and we wouldn't have to worry. This all worked well for a year and a half. At some point, Judy left the area and turned our account over to Eric Amorossi. The first tenants moved out, and Eric rented the house to a "friend".
Passing by the house in February we noticed that the main electrical service wires to the house had been cut off the house. We called Eric Amorossi right away. The weather was at a high of 20 degrees during the day and single digits at night. Eric didn't know anything about it. We called the power company, and they told us they cut the line because of non-payment of the bill. They found that the main service was not acceptable and would have to be replaced before the power was turned back on.
According to our "contract", this replacement was not our responsibility, as we were unaware of this problem and according to our agreement, all repairs would be handled by Investment Properties International. The power had never been turned off at this address since 1989.
Eric claimed that this was not his problem and that we should take care of it. Meanwhile, the tenant has no heat or light. This went on for a month and a half.
Finally, we received a letter from Eric stating that the house was more trouble than it was worth, and he wanted nothing more to do with it. He was cancelling the contract. We tried and tried to reach him, either getting his answering machine at his office, or being told that he was not home at his home phone. He finally returned our numerous phone calls at a time that he knew neither of us were home, and left a vague, regretful message. We have never heard from him again. We got no keys back, or the mortgage payment book, nothing. When we went to the house, we could never find the tenant, but his dogs were living in the house by themselves. I did remember that Eric told me the tenant's name and his place of employment during some conversation we had earlier in the year. I couldn't find a lawyer or anyone who would help us with this. We finally got in touch with the tenant and evicted him.
We could not believe the condition of the house. There was still no power. The tenant told us he used the gas stove for heat, but there was no way the damage was caused by that. All the walls were black with some sort of greasy soot. The pale blue carpeting was uniformly black, dog feces were everywhere, they had urinated on the carpet, the whole house was absolutely filthy. The windows were coated with black soot, filthy dishes piled everywhere and much of the tenant's belongings that he left behind. Garbage was mounded in the driveway along with broken furniture, windows were broken, screen non-exsistant, the list goes on and on. We had to rent a roll off dumpster to clean the house out and it was filled.
We did find a lawyer who would listen to us for a fee, (that's another story) and he told us that the contract that we signed was nothing more than a glorified tenant/landlord agreement and that the person we signed with, Judy Knecht, was the person we had the problem with.in short, there was nothing legally we could do but go after her, and we don't know where she is.
This has cost us thousands of dollars, put marks on our credit because mortgage payments were continually made late, water bills not paid, etc.
We would appreciate greatly any help or advise on how to recoop the losses of time and money that was spent to make this house salable again. It took over a month of daily effort to clean, repaint, recarpet and fix.
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