 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Connery Goodwin. I'm the communications manager here at ProPublica, and I'd like to thank you for joining us today. For those who don't know us, ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to exposing abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur real-world impact. Last month, we published an investigation about the company behind We Buy Ugly Houses and uncovered questionable business practices. For today's event, we'll hear from the reporters and editors who worked on this story, and then we'll invite on outside experts to discuss our findings, consumer protections, and potential pathways to change. And now, allow me to introduce our first group of speakers. Byer Duncan is an engagement reporter for ProPublica based in Oakland, California. He uses crowdsourcing tools to report on consumer protection issues. Reporter Anjanette Damon is part of ProPublica's Southwest Newsroom and lives in Reno, Nevada. She reports on housing, healthcare, and government accountability. Michael Squires is the editor for ProPublica's Southwest Newsroom based in Phoenix, Arizona, where he oversees five reporters. Squires will moderate this portion of the conversation, and then we'll hand the mic to Anjanette who will moderate a panel of conversation with a consumer advocate, a real estate regulator, and a homeowner advocate. We'll also answer your questions. To ask a question at any point, you can do so by clicking the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and typing it there. I'll let Squires take it from here. Thanks, Connor, and thanks to everybody who's joined us to learn more about this important reporting. I think to get started, I would just like to ask Anjanette how this investigation got started, if you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, I think it started with a curiosity that a lot of people in the public have that maybe a lot of our listeners here have had when you see those billboards and those signs postured all over neighborhoods when you're getting text messages, phone calls, letters in your mailbox, and digital ads, you're wondering what is this Ash for Houses kind of thing? What is this We Buy Ugly Houses? And we were in a group meeting talking about housing and issues important to housing and Byrd and I and Sarah Smith, one of the earlier reporters on this project said, we got to be, we got to dig into this. Let's find out who's behind these signs and how they do business and what the consequences of that might be. And it was as simple as that really. So Byrd, as you began to dig into this, what were some of the questionable practices that you began to see in your reporting? So as a first step, we did a couple of things. We submit records requests to the FTC and to attorneys general across the United States and we also built a, what we call on the engagement team at ProPublica a call out form, which is just an attempt to kind of crowd source tips or expertise or just narrative evidence about a particular entity or company from a wide audience of people and just kind of see what comes in and categorize that. We kept our call out pretty general because like Anjanette mentioned, you know, we were still kind of unsure about these entities, these broader We Buy Houses entities, real estate investors, cash buyers. But it became clear pretty quickly based on our records requests and some of their call out responses that home investors was, you know, the self proclaimed largest home buyer in the United States. They're among the most well established, you know, they're older than 20, 25 years old. And through sort of subsequent records request, we did we did learn that indeed there is, you know, a series of lawsuits there's a robust body of consumer complaints filed to state agencies into the FTC about the company. And also just some sort of modest local news coverage of folks who had landed themselves in trouble franchisees who had landed themselves in trouble, sort of with those three things kind of to go on that's when we started to dig a little bit deeper. So, as we do investigative reporting we're often looking for harm people who are being harmed by certain practices by either businesses or government. Anjanette, were you able to identify like certain populations individuals types of individuals who are being targeted by this marketing. I mean I'll start off with the company's response and when we interviewed, when we submitted questions to home besters they were very clear that they do not target particular kinds of people or groups of people. Their argument is that they target the house with their advertising so they're looking for particular types of properties that would be a part of their successful for their business model. And, you know, they described those homes as older homes and kind of the mid price point range. What we found when we started digging into the advertising the types of people who engaged with the cash home buyers we found that often those homes were owned by people in desperate situations or vulnerable situations. And these were the people that were signing contracts with franchises of home besters. Oftentimes, the types of homes that were targeted by home besters are owned by older adults. They look for neighborhoods with a high concentration of people who have a lot of equity in their houses. Often that means that you've owned your house for a long time and maybe don't have a really deep understanding of how much it's worth. And the fact that you have a lot of equity, even have the house paid off sometimes means that you might be focused on the number a cash number of how much money you might need to get you out of a certain situation, and not necessarily how much money your house is worth. And so we saw some of these interactions with home besters franchises that they would really focus the conversation on that number and not necessarily what the house was worth. And so if you need $10,000 to travel across the country to see your dying mom, that was the number that they were focusing on. If you paid $30,000 for your house in the 1960s or 1970s, then maybe $100,000 sounds like a lot to you when your house is really worth $500,000. So yeah, people in desperate situations, the company teaches their franchises to find the pain and leverage that pain, present themselves as a solution to that pain. So those are the types of people that we found were doing doing business with help ambassadors. So as you mentioned, we had, we began to engage with the company and they were answering our questions but as we got toward getting closer to publication the story did unfold in sort of an unusual way buyer can you just can you talk a bit about how this played out. Absolutely. So here at ProPublica we always ensure when we've got a big story coming out that give whatever entity we're investigating ample time to respond in detail to a long list of detailed questions and findings. So we had been engaged with home besters for a couple weeks around just a lot of specific questions that we were giving them the opportunity to respond to. And for the most part they were forthcoming and they would respond to our questions and as much detail in many cases as much detail as they could. But we also learned that behind the scenes home besters at the time was basically working proactively to undermine our reporting. They had called a on all franchisee meeting held sort of in a webinar online webinar, just a couple weeks before our reporting came out in which the CEO, the COO the general council and then somebody involved in the investment firm that owns home besters all addressed their franchisees and basically laid out a plan to quote bury our reporting using tools like SEO buys sort of competitive, you know, content generation blog posts social media posts. And it was a very interesting sort of narrative arc of this hour long meeting because at first they began by, you know, attempting to critique our reporting that they didn't really raise any factual issues with it. And soon after that they settled into an acknowledgement that they needed to change some of their policies, which we had laid out some of the practices that their franchisees were engaging in, and ultimately concluded that we had done solid reporting. We didn't make anything up and in fact the CEO of home besters said something along the lines of this will make us a better company. We had the pleasure of viewing this webinar, and we ended up writing a follow up story about sort of their subsequent attempts to undermine our reporting. So you could say that we had had in this in doing this project impact even before we published which is not always the case and you know it's obviously gratifying, given that that's the aim of our work is to make things better. I don't know how many it was committing to do that but there's also been other or discussion of other changes or, you know, adjustments that need to be made to kind of address this problem magic can you talk a bit about that. Yeah. I'll just adjust real quickly specifically with the company the practices that they wanted to change. In a lot of other arenas time shares for example, annuities. Oftentimes there's a right to rescission or time period where you can second guess a contract maybe back out of it. Orina that doesn't exist. And furthermore what what home besters franchises were doing and a lot of people that a lot of house clippers are doing is they would record documents on the house's title, often called a memo of contract for sale, that would really trap the person into the contract so if they were second guessing things or thought you know maybe I'm being taken. They wouldn't be able to back out of that very easily and oftentimes the franchise would end up getting paid off not just maybe cash that they had put in upfront but additional money just to get out of the contract. One of the more predatory behaviors that we identified in the reporting and when buyer talks about the practices that the company decided to change they home besters has now prohibited its franchises from engaging in that particular behavior. After the story ran just last week. The US Senate committee took notice of the reporting. And when the director of the consumer finance Protection Bureau came to give his semi semi annual report to Congress. And he was asked about this reporting asked what that agency can do to better protect consumers from predatory house flipping behavior. He said that he believed that the Department of Justice and all of the states attorneys general should be made aware of this. Right after that presentation to us senators sent a letter to the National Association of Attorneys Generals, asking them to create a more coordinated approach to monitoring, looking for trends predatory trends, and even urging state producers to create this so called cooling off period or, or, you know, a couple day breathing window where people can assess the contract and decide whether or not to get out of it. Let's let's look at a couple of questions that have come in from members of our audience and one is, how can you stop receiving, you know, these this marketing email whether it's a you know flyer that comes in the mail or emails or calls. What is the best sort of best practice on how to do that. I can weigh in on that a little bit. There are options you know home vesters has said that if you contact the number on their flyers and tell them you want to be removed. I think they even provide on the flyer. If you get a contact information to get, get yourself removed. They will take you off or more accurately their third party sort of marketing in house marketing agency will take you off now in practice does that really work. You know, I've all I can say that is that I've read a lot of consumer complaints from people who seem to continue to receive flyers from home vesters and from other house flippers like them. And so there's, I mean there's a quite, there's a question of just asking the company to remove you you can also go to the FTCs do not call registry. But frankly, it is sort of like trying to grab a fistful of sand you know there's all sorts of ways for these companies to sort of bypass those laws there's loopholes. So it's very possible that if you're tired of getting flyers, you tell a company to stop there's just going to be other companies, other competing LLCs that might send you similar flyers and it's kind of hard to tell them all apart. So there are things you can do but it is sort of a perpetual sort of sycophane battle if you really no longer want these flyers landing in your mailbox. So why don't you take this on. There's a couple of questions that are sort of similar and I'll try to combine them. What is how do you differentiate home vesters from other, you know, whether they're home flippers or even like Zillow other other people operating sort of the home buying space. And then, this is sort of related how would you, how would you know if you're dealing with a franchise, a home vesters franchise when you're contacted. I think the difficulty in reporting this story and probably difficulty that regulators and policymakers have is there's just not a lot of transparency out there. So the difference is, there's been a lot of attention lately to big private equity investment firms that are coming in and buying a large swaths of neighborhoods. Zillow and companies like Zillow and Open Door were in the business also of buying houses on mass like that Zillow has since gotten out of that business because it turns out their algorithm wasn't so great at predicting the value of the house. What and those activities present different kinds of problems than what we were looking at in this story. Those buyers can be paying close to market value. But when you have large institutional buyers coming in and buying up a bunch of inventory and then becoming landlords and renting that out that has a different kind of impact on on on the housing market. So as how you know whether or not you're dealing with home vesters that that is a challenge and I think even some home vesters franchisees will acknowledge this. Most of it comes back to their marketing. They spend an awful lot of money building the brand we buy ugly houses. So you'll see that tagline on the letters that you get in the mail. You'll see that tagline on the billboards on the signs. Often it'll be accompanied by the caveman. And often their their advertising will say home vesters. Home vesters is a little different than those bandit signs we call them that are kind of tacked up on telephone poles and say we buy houses. Oftentimes you'll be dealing with a different kind of or maybe not different kind of a different flipper. Often these people are operated in this space use a lot of the same tactics. But I also believe when the franchise, which is operating under a different LLC with a different name entirely, they'll often identify themselves as home vesters. Because the written material will probably have home vesters on it somewhere so that way you can kind of know that yes I am dealing with a franchise of this big national company. Thanks, I'll combine a couple of other questions as well that have come in and these are more related to kind of how we went about the reporting on this one, apparently from a journalist, wondering if there are tips for pursuing reporting on this topic and then also this is sort of related. What are the documents, you know we often put in records request to get documentation to back up our investigations. Like what would those will be the documentation or the public records we'd be going after this kind of investigation buyer buddy you talk to speak to that. At the local level I think the best place to start if you want to understand the behaviors and whether there have been any complaints or violations about local franchises in your area. The best document to start reviewing is the franchise disclosure document, and that is a publicly disclosed document in every state where home vesters does business you can get it from your whatever agency in your state handles franchising. And it's a long detailed document about 350 pages long that home vesters as a broader entity is required to submit, which will include information about their financials information about the success and failure rates of franchisees. Most importantly, in contact information for every current and former franchisee in your city or city. It has a list of all 1150 and then I'm not sure how far back it requires that they go with former franchisees but I seem to remember maybe about 400 500 former franchisees listed as well. And you can just call those people. If you want to learn a little bit about sort of the franchise franchisee franchise or relationship with home vesters. Or you can submit records requests to your attorney general or to the real estate commission in your state for complaints about those entities names or simply home vesters of America as an entity. One thing we noticed when we were submitting records request is, you don't always get a lot of hits when you're just searching home vesters more broadly because many times people will complain about the LLC about the franchise name, and the franchise names don't have home vesters in them in fact home vesters forbids franchises from even using the term home buyer in their franchise names so the best place to if you want to do a sort of sweeping records request. You can just look at the franchise disclosure document, pull all the franchisees and see if there are complaints about all of those franchises in your area. I would just jump in here to say not every state actually requires that a franchise disclosure agreement is filed with that state but that doesn't mean you can't go to the states that do require it so you know, Minnesota, and California are a number of states that do. And as Byron mentioned in that document you do have a list of all the current LLCs that are operating in your area. So then you can use those LLC names sometimes to go and research property documents you can research court documents whether or not one of the practices that they engage in also is to file specific performance or breach of contract lawsuits. So if you go to the courts and search not home vasters but search those individual LLC names that are operating in your area, you can get a good sense of who's active there and who might be engaging in some of this more aggressive behavior. And just one more thing just be perfectly clear. If you're saying California, or excuse me if you're saying the state I'm not sure what state that does not require a franchise disclosure document. You can go get California's or Minnesota's or Wisconsin's, and that has the franchise is not just in those states but every single one in every single state. So another question that's coming in is, is, I think kind of interesting in that it looks at sort of the cultural aspect of this is the kind of fix and flip type tell reality TV shows. It's been popular in recent years. How do you see that playing the question is, you know, did they give credibility to these kinds of companies, or, you know, make some people maybe more vulnerable in situations like this I guess I'd add that to the question. I think one thing it does is it is a marketing mechanism to get more people into the house flipping business. Oftentimes these shows these YouTube's YouTube gurus and videos are selling systems for getting rich off of house flipping. I think it's presented as a easy business activity that you don't need a lot of upfront money for. And I think the danger of that is real estate's a really complex environment and so when a lot of people that don't really understand real estate or maybe don't have the education, or the training to be made aware of what kinds of behaviors are predatory, or a lot of them are kind of getting into the business and one that can result in in danger to the consumer. It's also kind of dangerous for the quote unquote investor or the person who's trying to get into house flipping and not really understanding what they're doing. So, yeah, it kind of glamorizes that lot lifestyle and not just on the cable TV shows but online YouTube social media, Instagram is full of these videos that are kind of glorifying this lifestyle that household per se is available to you if you get into the business and that can be problematic. I think what it's worth very briefly noting to that investors in line with its reputation for really scrupulous image management. They file a lot of lawsuits against folks who use the term ugly houses or we buy ugly houses together they have several trademarks and I think right now they're actually involved in a lawsuit with HGTV over a show called ugliest house in America. And I think because I think that home investors feels that even though that's not a direct encroachment of their mark. It's close enough that it's threatening their business so I think in December they file the lawsuit against HGTV for that. Great, that's a good stopping point for this part. Thank you guys for sharing those behind the scenes details. I'm going to keep angina on the line, and invite the rest of our speakers on, but thank you squires and buyer for contributing there. Next for the next, this next segment is a Sarah Mancini grant Cody and Kate Dugan. Sarah Mancini is co director of advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center and focuses on racial justice issues surrounding homeownership, including access to mortgage loans and preventing foreclosures and home equity theft. She's based in Atlanta, and for over 10 years represented homeowners in Atlanta legal AIDS home defense program. Grant Cody is an attorney and former assistant attorney general who currently serves as the executive director of the Oklahoma real estate commission, which is responsible for licensing and regulating Oklahoma's real estate industry. And lastly, Kate Dugan is a state staff attorney in the homeownership and consumer rights unit at community legal services of Philadelphia, where she represents low income homeowners facing a variety of real estate issues, including property tax foreclosure, mortgage foreclosure, entangled titles. I'll let Angela take it from here. Thanks again for joining us. I want to turn this portion of the conversation to kind of what people individuals can do to protect themselves what family members can do to help protect family members. And then what regulators and policymakers can do to look at this environment. And if there's any kind of changes or tweaks that could be made there to protect consumers as well. And so the first question which I'll kind of open it up to all of you to weigh in on is, why is it difficult for regular people to protect themselves from unfairness in the process of selling their home. Sarah, do you want to start. Sure. Thank you so much. Much on Jeanette, and it's great to be with you all. I think what makes this so difficult for regular people is that many homeowners do not have an accurate understanding of the value of their house the fair market value, particularly if they've lived in the home for a long time. And another thing that contributes to this is the under appraisal of particularly homes and communities of color that for a long time, we have not had accurate appraisals of these homes and there's been under appraisal and bias in the system. And so that really makes people even more vulnerable to being persuaded to sign a contract to sell their home for less than it's worth if they don't have a clear sense of what their home is worth. And another thing that makes it challenging is that consumer education is really difficult to effectively do ex ante before people really need it it's it's not effective because people are busy so they're going to they're not going to go read up about how to sell their home. Until they're in the moment where they need to do it. And the scammers are so the people that are doing this business model of direct purchasing of homes for less than their worth are so effective at reaching people and convincing them to sign on the dotted line. And so it's very hard for people who are consumer advocates and homeowner advocates to get the information to them before they sign a contract. And Kate what would you add to that. Yeah, in addition to what Sarah said engine and I think you pointed this out really well is that home festers and other wholesalers target people in really vulnerable situations. And when people you know feel like their back is against a wall they may make a decision without thinking it through, you know in a way that somebody should be able to think such a huge decision through. We know that these companies target people in property tax foreclosure who have big beans against their property, who need home repairs, and who maybe aren't aware that a lot of places have help. And in Philadelphia there is there is help for you if you owe property taxes but a home vester's wreck is not going to tell you that. So people don't have all the information and they think that this is the only answer. We know that there's you know, these are these are very convincing sales people. And you know we have a whole area of law consumer law to protect people against high pressure sales techniques because of this. The problem is that these these homeowners are selling something so it's sometimes a little difficult to frame them as consumers and bring them, you know within the protections of existing consumer laws. But this is the, the concept of a high pressure sales technique isn't new and we've been trying to protect people against it and all sorts of areas for years. And Grant what are your thoughts. Sure, I'll just add on I think obviously there's a large gap in sophistication of the parties when we're talking about wholesale transactions right. There's one group that's coming to you with a contract that they created so inherently it's going to be in their interest and I think what we see here and at the Oklahoma real estate commission oftentimes is that people simply don't know what they're signing and I think the action of coming to somebody and saying, I want to buy your home here's a purchase agreement in fact that purchase agreement is really more of a marketing agreement, you know the title of it purchase agreement and the pitch of I'm going to buy your home is really disingenuous most of the time so the lack in bargaining power, the discrepancy with education, and frankly as as Kate and Sarah alluded to, you know the need that many of these people have all contributes to frankly speaking just a lack of fairness and a high barrier to understanding and so that's why we see so many issues that are still the lack of regulation on this topic as well. Yeah, I want to take just a moment to kind of define some terms here because there's different kinds of behaviors that we're addressing in our conversation. When you when we talk about cash buyers people are offering cash for homes they can come in a wide variety of different types. The major burden is fixing flippers or house flippers. A lot of times consumers might hear this and expect that a cash buyer is coming and buying their house fixing it up and selling it again. Right. And then there's this other whole arena called whole sailing and grant. I know we're going to talk with you a little bit more about this a minute in the conversation but I just want to kind of define this whole sailing activity is when you sign a contract to sell your house with an individual that person then sells the contract to another investor and for a higher price and takes a chunk of money on that that's a very simple explanation of what's going on there. So that person that you're signing the contract with never actually takes ownership of your house. And, and it's, it can lead to all sorts of problems that we'll get into, but just as we're talking about cash buyers house flippers whole sailors that's kind of a little bit of background for what we're discussing here. And so my next question. Sarah, if there's, when you talk with people in the industry they often say look there is definitely room for our kind of business here. Sometimes there are people who absolutely need to sell their house quickly sometimes they're willing to trade money for convenience. That's a different kinds of situations. If you happen to have a house that might be difficult to sell or you might need to do it quickly. How should you approach doing that. So, I pushed back a little bit on the idea that this business model is serves a role I think that there may be instances where that's true but in the current housing market. If someone needs to sell their house even if they need to sell it quickly. We have a very hot market right now and even if someone lists their home with a traditional real estate agent or realtor. You can sell your house pretty quickly if you price it right. So I think if someone is feeling like they've got to sell quickly or they don't have the money to make repairs or their house might be difficult to sell. So the best recommendation is to first of all do your own research about what your house is worth. Through online of valuation websites like Zillow and e praise all and home snap, and then talk to a licensed real estate agent about what they think your home would sell for. If you're in a situation where you really think you want to take a discounted price in exchange for speed or convenience, just be armed with that information so that you really know what you're giving up. And that a realtor can tell you is this really necessary to make this trade off because inherently if you list your home for sale publicly with a licensed real estate agent. You can open it up to the public market and in theory that would bring you the highest and best value any off market sale has a risk that it's going to be discounted because they're not opening it up to any outside buyers. And just sticking with you I want to kind of switch to kind of the individual perspective to more of the regulatory focus on policymakers can do. First, if you could kind of give us the lay of the land about what kinds of regulations exist out there I mean our reporting found that this is in a lot of jurisdictions there are no regulations out there. So can you kind of give us the lay of the land and then I'll go to Kate and grants talk about some specific measures that have been done in their communities. Yes, happy to do that and give that that lay of the land. I will just say one thing so that I don't forget which is that a lot of folks who are in distress. So there is relief available either if you're behind on your mortgage there's relief through the homeowner assistance fund programs that are in all the states. There can be property tax assistance, finding a HUD certified housing counselor can help people get a loan modification. So I wanted to be sure to mention that because to some extent when we talk about policies that would prevent undervalued home sales or high pressure sales, those are all the same policies that help people who are in financial distress. So whether it's property tax relief, mortgage relief or foreclosure avoidance laws that deal with foreclosure rescue scams those are all in the same family of laws. And various states have protections and there's also some protections at the federal level, but it's really important to get legal help from free legal services office or a HUD certified housing counselor, which you can find at HUD.gov. So as far as laws that specifically regulate the business practice of direct cash purchase of homes, or what I call high pressure home sales, or as you refer to on Jeanette as you said there are different practices here, wholesalers, all of that is not much. There are not very many states or localities that have tried to legislate and I hope that the piece that ProPublica has done here will call more attention because I think there's a need for much more. The places that I know of are Illinois, Texas, Oklahoma and Philadelphia. And I know Grant and Kate can speak to Oklahoma and Philadelphia. I'll just say that in Texas, that in Texas and Illinois, the approach has been related to wholesalers and requiring either licensure of wholesalers or some type of disclosure about what the wholesaler is doing. But again, it's pretty limited. And I think that we really need to see more focus on how to solve these problems. Yeah, and that's great. We're so lucky to have Kate with us here because Philadelphia has really kind of led the way in some pretty strong consumer oriented laws or homeowner since yeah you're not really buying something are you the homeowner protection laws. Kate, can you talk about what Billy has done. Sure. And I think it's important to sort of spotlight something Sarah said which is that, you know, we kind of think that there are two kinds of people are trying to protect with our law. It's people who want to stay in their home and neighborhood, and, you know, need help either through property tax relief or home repairs I mean I live in a city where every house is 100 years old so everybody needs repairs. Or just, you know, people who are vulnerable and will sign anything a friendly person puts in front of them. So that's that's, you know, first people who want to stay in their house. And then there are people who like truly do want to sell their houses like, you know, our my job is a homeowner attorney is like try to keep people in their houses but I acknowledge sometimes you want to sell sometimes you want to retire to Florida or somewhere warmer. And it's also about protecting those people and making sure that equity they've built up over years goes into their pockets and not the pockets of an investor. So that in mind, in late 2020 Philadelphia passed what we think may be the first in the nation, you know, package of laws to protect homeowners from predatory wholesalers and investors, and just very quickly because this is like it's our own our talk. There are there are sort of like four main areas of the law. And the first area is that before a after a person is presented within agreement of sale. They have a three day cooling off period before they can sign that agreement of sales they have to have agreement in hand for three days. And what this does is like it lets them show it to their families, maybe, you know, it's a senior their child finds it on the kitchen table and says hey bomb what's this. That's that's better to find before you've signed the contract than after that law also requires a disclosure form listing resources like property tax relief and repair programs so people think that I need to sell because I'm in distress. It gives them a chance to maybe call a hotline and talk about whether there are other options. It also requires the wholesalers to be licensed so Philadelphia and a lot of other cities require all sorts of businesses to be licensed. Anybody who is not a licensed real estate agent, because we cannot require those people to be licensed must license with Philadelphia as a property wholesaler. That gives us, you know, more information brings their behavior into, you know, some sort of regulatory oversight and, and imposes a pretty minimal set of ethical requirements that they have to follow in dealing with homeowners. The third and important part of this is if a whole if a wholesaler is not licensed which plenty in Philadelphia have not gotten licenses. A wholesaler has a right to cancel the contract up until the agreement of sale so there, there is this limited right of rescission in Philadelphia that if you have signed an agreement of sale with an unlicensed wholesaler, do have a right to rescind up until the day of closing, which has been a really important tool for for a lot of our homeowners. And the fourth and I think most popular, you know, I guess among city residents is that we established to do not solicit list which I also believe exists in New York for people who just don't want to be contacted by these wholesalers. And that's our that's our four part long, you know, sort of still seeing how that unfolds. I think that's one of our most common audience questions so far is how do I get off these lists I don't want the text messages phone calls anymore. Thank you for that. Grant, could you talk about what Oklahoma has done recently. Absolutely in November of 2021 Oklahoma passed the predatory real estate wholesaler prohibition act. And basically what we did is we took a look at the landscape. And we what we saw was as Sarah alluded to basically two schemes to address this have emerged nationwide so far, and really only in a handful of minority states. So you've got states that follow a disclosure approach which say if you're going to do this type of transaction you have to include a disclosure in the written agreement saying this is what I'm doing. I think when we looked at that the inadequacy became very clear very quickly which is that number one, that disclosure pretty much already has to be in there in order to actually do a wholesale transaction right because that person who's getting you to sign the agreement needs to have some language in that agreement that says you grant me the right to market and assign this for profit to someone else. So we kind of felt like you know the language is already in there and it's become clear to us that people are not really able to read and comprehend the magnitude of that small piece of language which oftentimes can be buried, you know on page four of a six page agreement and not really catch your eye the way that maybe the sales price would. So when we looked at that we felt like okay something else needs to happen here. And for us what we like to do is make sure that our regulation is proportional to what's going on and so for us. If you look at the actual conduct or the action of what's going on in this type of transaction. It really mirrors what real estate professionals are doing they are marketing a property that they do not own for profit. So, you know, really the discrepancy or the difference is rather than, you know, traditionally marketing the property itself you're marketing the contract as you mentioned before. But at the end of the day, you're making money by marketing a property you don't own and so for Oklahoma. We took a look at that and said the conduct the actual action is really identical to what real estate professionals are doing so. I think we became one of the first states if not the first state to enact a licensure requirement which said, if this is what you're going to do and you're going to publicly market these type of deals you have to get a real estate license. And why that's so important is number one, it requires a federal background check. So we know, okay, you know, if you have a felony or something like that you're not going to probably be able to get a license which makes sense you don't want someone with certain types of felonies getting unsupervised access to a home most likely. The second thing it does is it requires some basic education to be completed and an examination and national examination to be passed. Just to make sure there's a minimum level of, you know, professionalism and education and then most importantly, when you get a license that brings you within consumer protection laws and license law, which is going to mandate certain protections for the for the consumer. And it's also going to give free avenues for our consumers to file complaints to get help in the event that they are preyed upon or somebody who's working with them violates a state law or rule so these protections have been in place in many states since like the 1950s. And that's why you need to protect homeowners with, you know, the largest asset and oftentimes one of the biggest financial transactions that they'll do in their lifetime that not only affects them but their families as well. So there's a really, really important and tons and tons of law and history on protecting this area so for Oklahoma, we enacted that licensure requirement in order to level the playing field and target the conduct and say, you know, we're going to make sure you're being treated the exact same. Thank you and that's a nice segue actually to this next question. So much of real estate is low is regulated on the local level city county and state level. But I'm wondering if there's a role for Congress or the federal government to play here and one of our sources recently mentioned the safe act which was passed in the wake of the financial crisis, which kind of did a little bit of both where you put the federal law that's compelling states to, in this case license and regulate mortgage loan originators to again kind of ensure that model come of education and to provide a layer of oversight. Sarah would something like this work, something like the safe act work in this environment for wholesalers or house fullers cash buyers. So when we're thinking of this landscape of actors there is a role for possible federal legislation it could be done it could be addressed at the federal level, or the state level or in many places at the local level. So if there were political will. I think a federal statute could be very helpful and meaningful, and we could think about what would be the most impactful thing that could be done at the federal level. I do think that something like the safe act is worth exploring. In terms of requiring states to enact a licensure regime that is one way it could be done. I think at the National Consumer Law Center we are still thinking through, along with our colleagues around the country that represent low income homeowners, what would be the most impactful way to prevent these harms. And I have a number of ideas about that but I do think it could be done at either the federal level or the state level. Okay, can you talk a little bit about why it's difficult to one identify predatory practices but what gets in the way of creating regulatory fixes either at any level of government. Yeah, so, as I said, even though Philadelphia requires wholesalers to be licensed most of them have not gotten licenses. These licenses happen in people's homes behind closed doors. We often don't hear about it until people have already sold their houses. And as you pointed out, these investors hide behind layers of LLCs. It is extremely hard to track down who is doing what. You know, just anecdotally in Philadelphia, a lot of these investors develop sort of like a, they're friendly and full key and they're on a first name basis. So a lot of our clients call and say hey I talked to a guy named Joe. And we don't know Joe's last name, and you know the signature on the agreement of sale is a scribble. And it's very hard to track down until we're in litigation where we never ever want to be. It's hard to track down information about who's doing what. And I think that a lot of investors are behaving in a way that, you know, it's not surprising that they don't want their behavior connected to them. So it's hard to regulate somebody you can't find. So that's that's been a challenge. And it's, you know, with licensing requirements and you know with increased access to records through lawsuits and financial disclosure laws. You know, I think I think we're getting there but that has been a big challenge for us. I want to ask one last question of grant before we get into some of some audience questions. Where, where should the rails be like where should the line be drawn when we're talking about regulating this this industry. Yeah, that's a great question, because it's important to note that the act of assigning a contract for profit is actually very common in commercial real estate. And I think one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that this practice does actually have like a long standing application. But what we're specifically talking about is kind of basically circumventing license laws that exist because I'll tell you what, if you look at every state every state pretty much has a requirement that people who are wholesaling properties are marketing contracts for sale, or assignable contracts for sale like most of the states if you look at their actual statutes, it really does fall within the purview of their license requirements. For example, the South Carolina real estate commission this year issued a memorandum which basically said hey we're going to interpret the word, our definition of broker to include this practice because when we've looked at it, similar to Oklahoma, it's really the same thing you're you're marketing properties that you don't own for for a profit so I think you know, as far as where should the guardrails be I think the starting point for that is that they should be there should be an effort state by state to bring uniformity to this type of practice and to close the loopholes that are being used. I'm sure if you look in other states just like in Oklahoma what you'll see is, you know, people get around. Kate mentioned that you know a lot of people don't want to get a license that's because they don't want to have that accountability right, they don't want to have to operate within a regulatory framework so they do things like get a power of attorney from a framework so that they can use that power of attorney to circumvent license law requirements so to me I think the guardrails need to start with. Let's bring this practice into uniformity and let's close some of those loopholes that people are using to evade regulatory framework oversight and frankly free avenues for help for consumers. Thank you. So our first question from the audience that I wanted to address and it's, it's more geared towards the franchise model which home vesters operates under specifically. But this particular questioner wanted to know if the franchise model is a way for companies to reap profits while diffusing the responsibility for that profit driving behavior so you have kind of a corporate fault and you have individual businesses and it might be easy for either side to point fingers at oh no that's corporate fault oh no that's that individual franchises fault. And any of you have any thoughts on that. Maybe I can start on this one, I think that that may be the reasoning it was hard to look into the minds of people that develop these types of business models. I do think that there are legal arguments that could be used to tie franchisees back to the franchise wars and so it may not be effective actually to shield. The company that ultimately created the business model from liability but it is, it does seem very likely to me that that's the intent. I would argue that there are, you know, if there's enough acting together in concert, there still could be legal challenges that would be brought and oftentimes I think it's appropriate to explore those types of arguments. I will say that it does make things it makes it especially hard to gather information you know if you're gearing up to to litigate. It certainly operates even if it doesn't actually shift responsibility. It makes it hard for a person to call the right place to say like, who's the name what's the number, because I can imagine people getting bounced back and forth between franchise and Yeah, and I would just add on I think that's you know generally speaking one of the benefits from the perspective of a franchise right of a model is how do we expand our market share but you know lower our liability to a degree and I think when we make judgments or we look at groups like that one of the things that we need to do is take a good look at what training and what materials they're providing and the context within that relationship. Thank you. This is a question that I've gotten probably most frequently since the story is has run emails and phone calls and text messages from family members or even neighbors of older adults who are like how do I protect the older adults in my family or my neighborhood. And what should I say to them if they do approach me and say hey what should I do if I cash buyers has approached me. Kate what are your thoughts on that. So I, I would do a lot of what Sarah mentioned earlier, help them arm themselves with information. It is not giving legal advice to somebody to say hey you should know the value of your house before you sell it. You know a lot of real estate offices you know if you walk in will do a market analysis of your home for you for free without you committing to selling. You can even if Zillow's estimates are you know of varying reliability. You can look at your county assessment again you know they're they're pros and cons to using that number, but you can also use websites to look at recent sales in your neighborhood to see what other people sold for and did they use a real estate and that just that that sometimes puts a number into people's heads that is far different than what they thought and also just make sure that they have access to the kinds of things that could keep them in their house. If they want to stay in their house you know talk to the person, figure out is this do I want to retire to somewhere warmer conversation or, you know, my plumbing is broken and I think I need to leave situation like try to track them into like where do I want to go, and sort of, you know push them in a good direction from there so there's a way to be a supportive. Yeah. Can I add one point on the question. I think everything Kate said is right and the one other message I would really like to put in people's minds is to talk to your friends and relatives. The fact that if something is a good deal, it can wait for you to get independent advice before you sign on the dotted line, and that in most states, if you sign a piece of paper you can be bound by what you signed, potentially, even if you didn't understand it and even if the person sitting across the table lied to you about what it said. Unfortunately, I've heard from a number of low income homeowners that they were told this piece of paper is not a binding contract it's a paper. You know, and that can be wrong so if someone is pushing them and asking them to sign something. Anything that's a good deal can wait. If they are telling you they won't leave until you sign it. It's a red it's a big red flag, and I had a mentor who represented low income homeowners for 42 years, same as Bill Brennan, and he used to say, people can rob you with a pen and paper just as surely as they can rob you with a loaded gun. So just be aware that by signing something you can lose your rights. So don't sign until you get someone independent to look at it. Yeah, I would just echo that 100% you need a second opinion right I wouldn't go buy a car and walk into the first dealership I walked into and pay sticker price without maybe calling or visiting another dealership to get an idea of you know what the thing looks like. But the biggest thing is that you know at the end of the day people are not people don't go to law school they're not really equipped to read these complex legal agreements so you need to get somebody qualified to take a look at that and frankly in today's day and age, it's very simple to do that there's legal aid resources there's real estate professionals there's real estate commissions and associations. It's very simple to get someone to take a look at that and to tell you hey do you see any red flags in here, and then again communicate what your goals are. But I want to commend Kate on you know Philadelphia is cooling off period because I think what we see in Oklahoma is most of the big issues that we see come from high pressure sales tactics where people sign an agreement thinking and they're pitched verbally on what it is. But what they find out is hey they signed something a little bit different so you have to get an independent legal review from somebody. And frankly speaking, I mean you have to treat this agreement like what it is it, it's probably the most and one of the most important agreements that you'll ever sign so. Yeah, that really stuck out at me too and there's a lot of discussion about rescission periods and that's after you've signed a contract in Philadelphia case you need that three days you get the offer you three days to think about it before you sign something. A couple of our audience members, Sarah have asked you know what happens if I have already signed that contract or a loved one that signed that contract like what what can I do with this is, if we really need to get out of this contract. That's a great question and I think the answer is get legal advice as soon as possible. And for people to be aware that there are free legal services providers around the country. If you just Google find legal help, you're going to be looking for a dot org I'm not sure the website I know that the legal services corporation has a look up website and maybe probably could put that on the website but essentially for for most folks who are first below a certain income level, you may be able to get free legal advice from a legal services attorney in your city. And if not, you know, talking to a licensed realtor is also a good way but essentially if you've already signed a contract. Just be aware that there can be legal defenses, but it's helpful to act as soon as possible. And ultimately what sometimes happens is people don't want to go forward to close, and then they get sued for specific performance. So that the company will sue them to try to force them to go forward. And at that moment if you get sued you absolutely need legal advice immediately because there's a deadline to respond to that lawsuit. And I think in every state in the country there are potential legal claims and defenses that you could raise to to fight back. So it's not hopeless at that point even when you get sued but there is always a deadline to respond to any lawsuit and if you don't respond in time you lose by default. Yeah, I would agree with everything Sarah said and you know even if you if you call legal aid and they can't call you back for a week, get to the courthouse and file an answer you do not want to miss a deadline. Because a lot of these investors operate in such high volume, they do not want to pay their lawyers to litigate. If they know you're going to fight back, they may be willing to walk away it may be willing to settle with you, but you need to show up and fight. You need to get something on the record, you know lawyer can jump in later, but like don't wait really do it as fast as possible people can you can show up and file things on your own. You can represent yourself you know maybe while you're waiting for a lawyer. It's such a good point a lot of the lawsuits that we saw for specific performance a breach of contract ended up in a default judgment against the homeowner who just wasn't equipped to fight that lawsuit, and they either lost the house or on the hook for a good chunk of money. Just through a default. So here's, here's the last question, which I think is a good one it's something that I've been curious about as well and that's how the quote unquote traditional model of real estate sales doesn't always work for all people. It can be expensive. A lot of times people in black or brown neighborhoods don't have access to a loader sometimes there's certain neighborhoods the real estate agents just don't even want to go into or try and work with. So in some industries disruptive companies make the industry more efficient affordable or accessible. Is there any real estate sales model, or could wholesaling never be sufficiently regulated so as to result in good disruption for the real estate sales industry. I could sort of frame the question a little more because I think I'm the one that submitted that to you. It was a question somebody asked me and I'm not sure I ever had a good answer so I'm hoping, I'm hoping to get your thoughts. So one of the points of frustration, and so my office is located in North Philadelphia, which is, you know, primarily black neighborhood, primarily low income neighborhood there are no real estate offices around here so I feel bad telling somebody go to a real estate office, because a lot of realtors do not want to work with homes worth under $100,000 is on the commission model. So, so I will say that our law has gotten the attention of the real estate industry and actually a commitment from some local offices to try to do a better job working in these neighborhoods. Maybe a new realtor, you know lawyers are required to do pro bono work or low cost work. Okay, there is a model there for you know that traditional commission model to come in to neighborhoods and, and do, you know, represent homeowners who want to sell their homes. So, but other than that, you know, sometimes, sometimes new technologies or practices can be great. Sometimes they're completely unregulated and then you know it's like how do we bring them into regulation but I'd be love anybody else's life. Great, go ahead. I'll jump in and I'll just say, you know, as it stands no I don't think that this practice is a good disruptor, you have to have regulations in place that at a minimum require these individuals and, and people who are doing this right to have the same minimum commitments requirements and disclosures that other real estate professionals have. So unless there's a similar playing field with the regulations that are being followed, I don't see a positive disruption here. I think when we talk about positive disruption today, what we're talking about is, are you making it easier, are you making it more cost effective and am I still getting the same level of service protection or convenience and I think what you see here is a sales tactic that's promoted as being easier and promoted as being more efficient. And that's really not very fair because at the end of the day the property is still getting marketed, and you're still going through the same real process that you're going through so I personally don't think that the practice is a good disruption and I think even if you bring those individuals within the purview of existing license law at the end of the day you end up back where you started with kind of the same playbook being run out so I don't see it as a positive disruption and as far as real estate brokerages and offices not being in some of these communities I think that's absolutely true, but I also think we need to recognize the trend that we're seeing across the country right now which is getting rid of physical real estate locations and offices right it's, it's really kind of becoming less common that if I want to sell my home I walk down to a real estate office and meet with a professional. Nowadays, we see companies we see states like Illinois that allow offices that don't actually have to have a physical brick and mortar location anymore you can be a cloud speed. So I think companies and individuals have taken notice because of how much market share has been taken from them and some of these lower income neighborhoods or properties that might be at a lower value and I think because of the market that we have with their incredible demand and the lack of of industry inventory and supply. I do think that you're actually going to see that more brokerages and realtors and licensed professionals are making themselves available in these neighborhoods so I always think a great place to start is simply going to be a real estate commission website and looking up some licensed companies or calling your real estate commission and asking for help on where to start with looking for a help with a real estate professional. Great. That's our time for today. I want to thank all the speakers. This was an incredibly informative conversation and I really hope our listeners found it helpful. I also want to thank everyone in the audience who took the time to be with us today and from all of us at ProPublica. Thanks for joining and we'll see you next time.