Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. In this series on closing, we will discuss the options of closing in-person or closing remotely today. My goal is to discuss the actual closing date and options so that you understand a little bit more about what’s going on when selling your bare land to a real estate investor and that you feel more comfortable during the process since you will know what to expect.
When you buy or sell a house, you are given a closing date. It is probably marked on your calendar, and maybe you show up to the title company and you’re sitting there in front of them and you’re signing 5,000 pages, right? You’ve probably been through that experience before. Closing with bare land is a little bit different. It’s a little bit easier, actually. You have different options. When you think about bare land and having property, your property may be in a different city, or a different state, a different part of the country, maybe even a different side of the world than where you’re living right now. You have options to close remotely as well as in person.
What this means if you’re closing in person… You know what? Let me back up. On our contract, we say that the closing date is on or before a certain date. We’ve had some issues with title companies taking a little bit longer to close. We used to close in about two weeks in certain areas, and now we’re seeing it closer to four, sometimes even five weeks to close, especially as you get closer to summertime. We’ve been putting about four to five weeks on our contract, but we always say on or before that certain date. That way, if title can close faster and you want to get paid faster, that is an option because of that particular verbiage.
To better clarify, let’s just say we’ve gone through the title process, we’ve gotten the commitment and everything’s there, and title says, “We’re ready to close by this date,” if you want to close in person, the title company will schedule an appointment for you to come in and sign the information. If they’ve given us our information early enough, what we as TB Properties Buys Land is going to do is close remotely, we will get our paperwork overnighted and back to Title. We will send our wire or an overnight check to them, and if everything’s in line, when you come in to sign the paperwork, they’ll have several pages for you to sign. They’ll be able to fund you in person that day, which is pretty cool. What this means is you can walk away with a check from the title company and you can drive straight to your bank to deposit it. If you’re local or if you’re not local but you want to close in person, that’s certainly an option. Simply ask title for an in-person closing appointment and title will allow you to do just that.
Another option is remote, like we talked about earlier. If you’re far away or you don’t want the inconvenience of having to drive in, what you can do is ask for a remote closing. There are options there as well. Title can either overnight you the closing package with all the paperwork in there or you can choose to print it all out for yourself to save an extra day. However you receive your paperwork, all you have to do is drive to your bank who will notarize things for free most of the time or you can go to your local pack mail type place and they’ll notarize your paperwork for a fee.
Within your closing documents, you should also have an overnight label. You should also have instructions on which pages to sign and which to notarize. Sometimes they’ll even ask you to sign in blue ink. Once everything is signed and notarized, you take that label, you put that in the FedEx or the UPS envelope or let the attendant at the Pack Mail place do that for you and you hand it to them to ship. You don’t have to even think about anything or worry about an address. You just put that label on there and then you overnight it back.
Both are options for in-person and remote closing are safe and easy. You can drive in or you can choose to close remotely, and that is fine either way with us. I can’t speak for other real estate investors but when working with TB Properties Buys Land, we try to provide the ultimate transparency and support throughout the process. Once Title has setup your file we share the file number with you so that you can communicate with title directly. You can call title and say, “Hey, I’m the seller on file number ABC. I have questions. How am I going to get funded? I want this wired, or I want to close in person.” You can talk to them directly. We believe that transparency and communication is very important throughout the process and strive to provide that.
Here at TB Properties Buys Land, we always close through a title company for your safety. We pay in cash so that we can close quickly. We buy vacant land from people all over the country so if you have land in other areas, please feel free to reach out to us. We’re willing to check out your property and see if we can make an offer.
Thanks again for listening, and we look forward to working with you.