Chris Buys Homes in St. Louis Blog

When you sell a promissory note that has no property behind it, the price comes down to three things: who is paying, how well they have paid so far, and what happens if they stop. Unsecured means there is no house or land standing behind the note. Nothing can be foreclosed on if the payer […]

Where Owner Financed Homes in St. Louis Meet an Existing Mortgage Owner financed homes in St. Louis are usually sold by people who own them outright, and that is the first thing to check before you promise a buyer anything. If there is still a mortgage on the property, an owner financed sale is often […]

If you carried the financing when you sold a property and now hold the paper, you can sell a private mortgage in Missouri, and plenty of people do. The part that surprises most note holders is how the price gets set. A note is priced off the buyer’s risk, not off the balance the borrower […]

Nobody buys a rental planning to become a tired landlord. It happens gradually, usually across a decade, and the tipping point is rarely one dramatic tenant. What surprises people about being a landlord is the truth that the job never really switches off. The phone rings on a holiday because a toilet is overflowing. Vacancy […]

Before anything else, three decisions shape how you sell a rental property: whether the tenants stay, when you sell relative to your tax year, and who you sell to. Tenants first. A lease survives the sale in Missouri, so a buyer purchasing an occupied unit is buying the lease along with it, and month to […]

You don’t have to repair, clean or stage anything to sell in St. Louis. Chris’s team makes a fair cash offer with no fees, no commissions and no repair requests, and you pick the closing date. If the sale needs to happen in a week, that’s workable. If you’d rather wait until spring, that works […]

Many people are diversifying away from stock market investments to more tangible portfolio assets. Real estate investments are certainly the most common tangible asset investors start with. Buying a rental in St. Louis looks simple on a spreadsheet and gets complicated the day you own it. The investment property mistakes that hurt most are not […]

Finding a profitable investment property in St. Louis can seem like a fruitless endeavor. You scour neighborhoods, look at countless homes and attend auctions. No matter how many properties you look at, there never seems to be enough of a margin for you to pull the trigger and be profitable. Are there no worthwhile investment prosperities […]

The St. Louis real estate market has never been a boom-and-bust place, and that is still the most useful thing to know about it. Inventory stays tight, well-kept homes in the inner suburbs move quickly, and anything needing a roof, a furnace or a sewer lateral waits while buyers do the arithmetic. St. Louis real […]

Selling a house in a hot market sounds like it should happen by itself. Low inventory, competing offers, over asking. Then the listing sits, and the showings thin out after week two. The St. Louis housing market runs hot in slices, not everywhere at once. Buyers using a mortgage are shopping for move-in ready, because […]

In a seller’s market the first offer often lands within days, and that speed is exactly what trips people up. Preparing for offers in a seller’s market is less about celebrating the number on page one and more about reading pages two through eight, because that is where the money actually lives. Look at the […]

Most owners deduct the mortgage interest and the obvious repairs, then stop. The investment property tax deductions that get left on the table are the unglamorous ones: premiums on the landlord policy, casualty losses the insurer did not cover, mileage driving out to the property, the fee you pay a bookkeeper or a property manager, […]

Popular television shows make real estate investing seem easy with guaranteed profits. What these shows don’t show you are the behind-the-scenes tribulations that investors must go through in securing and rehabbing properties. Investment property financing in Missouri is stricter than a loan on the house you live in, and it stays stricter for the life […]

Assessed value vs market value trips up most sellers, because the county sends one number and a buyer offers another. The assessed value is what St. Louis County or the City assigns your property for tax purposes. Missouri puts residential property on the books at nineteen percent of its appraised value, so the taxable figure […]

Refinance or sell is a math question first and a life question second. Choosing to refinance your home makes sense when you plan to stay put, the rate genuinely improves, and the closing costs earn themselves back before you move. It stops making sense when the payment is not the real problem. If the house […]

Before anything else, three decisions shape how you sell a rental property: whether the tenants stay, when you sell relative to your tax year, and who you sell to. Tenants first. A lease survives the sale in Missouri, so a buyer purchasing an occupied unit is buying the lease along with it, and month to […]

Can I sell my house during foreclosure in Missouri? In most cases yes, and the window is wider than homeowners assume. A non-judicial foreclosure here runs on dates set by the lender’s trustee, and until the trustee’s sale actually happens the house is still yours to sell. What changes is who gets paid at closing. […]

Missouri is a non-judicial foreclosure state, which means the process runs faster here than in most of the country. A lender can move from a notice of default to a trustee’s sale in a matter of weeks once the file is referred, so the sale date is the number everything else is measured against. To […]

Probate home buyers get called for one of two reasons. Either the estate needs the house converted to cash so debts can be settled and shares divided, or the heirs live too far from St. Louis to manage a property here. Either way the first question is not price, it is authority. Nothing sells until […]