When it comes to real estate investing everyone is in it to make money.

Often I have seen sellers or investors trying to shy away from admitting they are making money on a deal. I don’t blame them, because I have seen other investors say, “If someone is not losing money, I am not making money” I don’t really agree with either of those perspectives.

Anyway, I received a call recently from a Fast Cash house buying program from someone with a property to sell, we will call him Bob.

Bob said that he had just inherited a property in North St. Louis county and wanted to sell it as quickly as possible. Through our conversation he commented on how he could tell that I was an honest guy, and he would like to do business with me. We scheduled a time to meet at the property for the following Wednesday.

Come Wednesday we met at the property, and shortly after things started to seem a little fishy. Bob acted on the phone like he had inherited the property, but after we met and talked more, he was revealing more that he was some sort of real estate investor, but also stuck with his story about having inherited the property.

Long story short, when doing my due diligence on the property, I noticed on the tax records that it was owned by another real estate investor that I have worked with in the past. From Bob’s story, it would insinuate that this investor/owner , “Joe” , had passed away.

Of course I immediately called Joe to ask about this fishy situation, and found out that Bob had been lying and was really just trying to basically assign his contract to us.

That is fine, that is great. Assign your contract to me, it happens everyday in real estate, and there is no problem with it. I had offered Bob a fair price anyway, and we could have both been very happy.

Instead Bob lied, and turned a fishy situation into a dead deal for him. Honesty is the best policy, and I called Bob to let him know what had happened and that I wanted to keep an open relationship with him, but we would need to be honest in the future. We can all make money without making up stories and muddying the water.