Name: Editorial: Protect vulnerable homeowners from high-pressure tactics
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Editorial: Protect vulnerable homeowners from high-pressure tactics

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If you own a home, you’ve gotten the unsolicited calls and texts offering cash for your property. They’re nuisances and easily ignored. But some people get them constantly, because through public records or private intelligence, homebuying companies have guessed they might be desperate to sell.

They target homeowners after a divorce or a death in the family, for example, as well as the infirm elderly, desperate poor and people in debt. The goal: to make a profit from buying houses well below market value, then flipping them at a fair market price either to new owner-occupants or to another flipper. Almost none of it is against the law.

The Post-Gazette Editorial Board spoke with one woman from Lawrenceville, who said that after the death of her brother, an LLC contacted their mother, who lived in a nursing home. The representative told her mother that the home had several liens and debts attached to it — but the company could take care of them if she sold the house for half its value. Her mother sold, and the company flipped the house for a 200% profit. The liens and debts, it turned out, were a lie.

That’s the kind of practice ProPublica discovered in its investigation of HomeVestors of America, better known as the We Buy Ugly Houses company. The report demonstrated that, despite official claims to the contrary, the company trains franchisees to target emotionally or financially distressed homeowners with high-pressure sales tactics. HomeVestors has numerous copycats and competitors, and they’re active all over the country, including in Pittsburgh.

The kind of deception the mother in a nursing home suffered is illegal, though very hard to prove after the fact, but pressing a grieving mother into making a terrible decision isn’t. Local laws can make it much harder to squeeze vulnerable homeowners. Pittsburgh should follow Philadelphia by enacting protections for them, so they can’t be fooled or bullied by one high-pressure conversation into giving away a lifetime of equity.

In Philadelphia, a 2020 law includes an essential homeowner-protection provision Pittsburgh can adopt: a Homeowner’s Bill of Rights. Prospective buyers must furnish this document to the seller, which discloses the seller’s right to a lawyer and/or real estate agent, as well as options for seeking a fair assessment of the home’s market value. Most importantly, the seller cannot sign away the home until three days after receipt of the Bill of Rights, building in time to seek out advice and short-circuiting the high-pressure routine.

There’s nothing wrong with making money buying and selling real estate, but there is something wrong in a company maximizing its gains by exploiting the vulnerable. City Council should bring the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights to Pittsburgh. No one deserves to have a lifetime of memories and equity stolen away due to one desperate, subtly coerced, decision.

If you own a home, you’ve gotten the unsolicited calls and texts offering cash for your property. They’re nuisances and easily ignored. But some people get them constantly, because through public records or private intelligence, homebuying companies have guessed they might be desperate to sell.

They target homeowners after a divorce or a death in the family, for example, as well as the infirm elderly, desperate poor and people in debt. The goal: to make a profit from buying houses well below market value, then flipping them at a fair market price either to new owner-occupants or to another...

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Byard Duncan

Editorial: Protect vulnerable homeowners from high-pressure tactics

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