I posted to another forum topic before I found this one but since this forum is specific to my issue I thought I would give you all a try. The one thing I know is that this doesn’t look good for us. Okay… My husband and I are in a Lease-Purchase Agreement in PA with the option to buy ending this month. We are ready to purchase the property and already have 10k into with a sale price of 99k. The house was recently appraised at 120k. The sellers are now located in TN. We just received a letter from a TN bankruptcy court stating that my husband and I are listed as creditors of an unsecured debt in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy that was filed this month by the sellers in TN. We immediately went to the court house to file a memorandum where we were informed that our Lease-Purchse Agreement was not able to be recorded because the notary public notorized the adendum rather than the the agreement. The adendum does hold the signatures of both of the sellers (husband and wife) as well as all of the portion pertaining to our money and all of those terms. I contacted the bankruptcy court and they told us that the sellers do have the house listed in there bankruptcy claim as well. The sellers say that their bankruptcy should not affect our contract because they intend to tell the bank that they will continue to make payments on it so they won’t lose the property to the bank. However, we can’t exercise our purchase option right now because the bankruptcy proceedings are blocking us from any action that would access funds from the sellers. Also, the sellers have stated that their attorney told them that even if the bank takes the house from them (the sellers) that the bank is going to want to sell it to us anyway because we are already living in it and it would be too costly and time consuming to have us removed, and that they (the sellers) still intend to make sure we receive our 10k back either in equity if we get the house from them or by personally paying us back. I think that is a load of you know what because then why list us on the bankruptcy in the first place? Our FICO score is still not high enough for conventional financing so I’m really scared about this whole mess. The mortgage company we were speaking with was just going to do a re-fi but now know one knows what is going on. Any advice you have would be appreciated more than you know.
~Colleen
Contact a Real Estate Attorney and a Bankuptcy Attorney and tell them your story they would have a better aswer for you and should be able to tell you what your options are. It looks like you guys been taken for granted. Don’t get caught up in some one else’s mess. Act A>S>A>P
Thank you. We have an appointment but we were wondering if any out there might have any information or knowledge that could help us in the mean time. It is already to late not to get caught up in someone else’s mess considering they have 10k of our money and have listed us as creditors in their bankruptcy proceeding. Ahhhhhhhh.