Washington Lease To Own

"So, if I haven’t said it before, let me say Thank You…a non-skeptical, heart-felt thank you. We would recommend the program to anyone else in a similar situation."-J&R Meadows

About Our New Home

R. and I have three children, two jobs, two dogs and, until recently, two apartments with two rent payments that we were renting to house our family and decades worth of accumulation of furniture, clothing, electronics and all of the things that a typical, hard working couples acquire in raising a family. Before that though, we were homeowners. Then, we were not.

What caused us to change our status from homeowners to tenants paying rent to a landlord was that our income dropped severely when R.’s employer re-negotiated his contract with the union. Before that, R. was working a lot of overtime and getting regular pay raises that combined with my income enabled us to pretty much make our payments on the house, the cars, the credit cards and all of the other debt that we took on to support our lifestyle. While it was not easy we were happy enough and able to enjoy living in our own home with all of the benefits that brought.

Well, the drop in income of about $15,000 per year pushed us over the line and we had to give up the house and move into the apartments. It was very stressful for everybody, especially the children and our rent payment was actually a little higher than our house payment had been. We were still working as hard as we always had and felt like life was not treating us fairly. Needless to say, our credit was damaged pretty heavily in the process making it very unlikely that we could qualify to borrow money again within a couple of years to buy a home even though with our two jobs we still had a pretty good income. We knew that for sure because we had talked to some lenders who told us that because of the bankruptcy it would be at least two years before they could consider an application from us.

As bad as all that was it started to get a little bit worse. Our landlord told us that they wanted to raise our rents because our lease was up and we didn’t want to sign another one, locking us into high rents for another year.

So, I started looking for a better situation and that’s where I found your ad in the paper. It said something about acquiring a home and improving our credit at the same time, rent to own a house or something like that. I had heard about this type of offer before. R. and I were very skeptical. Remember, we had just gone through months of hell including a bankruptcy and an unsympathetic landlord and I guess we were pretty skeptical of just about everyone.

When we contacted you and found out that we would have to pay a fee to get help to repair our credit to qualify for your program we were even more skeptical. But the fact was that our next best option was to find another rental, move again with all of the hassle and expense of that and in the end not really have improved our situation at all. And we did need some help, someone who could advise us about how to really move out of the situation we found ourselves in; to watch our back.

When you explained what the consulting fee was for and how we would receive expert credit advice for up to two years to help us improve our credit so that we could qualify to buy, well, that made sense. When you explained how the program worked, that we would work with your realtor and choose the home that we wanted to live in…and buy eventually…and how you would match us with an investor to actually buy the house for us, lease it to us and give us an absolute option to purchase it at a fixed price within two years it actually made a lot of sense to us. We understood that the investor would make a profit and that was alright. They were taking a risk and helping us.

We really just wanted to find a home, not an apartment, one that we could choose, that we could buy, that we could move into…soon…and stay put. We examined the list of homes that we could choose from and found one that looked like a great fit in a good neighborhood. You made an offer on the home at what looked like a very good price…for the investor and for us. We appreciated that you took the trouble to have a home inspection and purchase a homeowner warranty and that there wouldn’t be any major capital expenses like the roof, the structure, the electrical systems or the plumbing that we would have to replace any time soon. It took a little while, a few weeks actually, to negotiate all of that and calculate what the final rent payments and option price would be but we could see that you, Betty Wohlford the real estate agent, our credit counselor, the investor, the inspector, the lender, the title company and everyone involved in the process was working toward making it happen and it all came together pretty much the way you said it would in the beginning. We had to take a few deep breaths along the way because not everything happened ideally but our confidence grew as we progressed.

Bottom line, we are now in our home, we know what the deal is, it looks possible that when we re-finance to acquire title from the investor that the value of our home will be at least equal to or greater than what our acquisition cost will be. We are committed to do our part and look forward to improving our credit. That is going to feel really good. Our investor/landlord seems like a really nice guy. We are working with him to do some improvements that we would like to do to our home. What a difference from just three months ago.

I don’t know what we could have done that would have been better for us. I guess maybe we are even still a little skeptical, even after it all happened the way you said it would. Maybe it is hard to believe that a program like this really can be good for everyone involved. It just seems like in the past we had to lose and everyone else was winning…at our expense.

So, if I haven’t said it before, let me say Thank You…a non-skeptical, heart-felt thank you. We would recommend the program to anyone else in a similar situation.

J & R Meadows