Video Transcription
Don Wede: Good afternoon. This is Don Wede with Heartland Funding. I want to get some of this nice scenery in here behind me. I’m in Peru, Illinois at Baker Lake shooting this video today. It’s June 27, 2019. My name is Don Wede with Heartland Funding Inc.
I want to go over my activities of yesterday with you. I was up in Kane County, Illinois and DuPage County, Illinois. I took in a lot of properties. We were in Lombard, Illinois; Aurora, Illinois; Elgin, Illinois; Sugar Grove, Illinois; Darien, Illinois; Glendale Heights, Illinois; Roselle, Illinois; Wheaton, Illinois; Burr Ridge, Illinois; Woodridge, Illinois. What was I doing up there? I was driving around and door knocking… whoop, there goes my glasses, and talking to people who have had had a foreclosure started on them. Lis pendens was filed at the courthouse in that county starting a foreclosure action.
So what I try to do is go around, knock on doors, give them a card, and I kind of use a soft approach. I just tell them up front that we’re a house buying company, if they ever wanted to sell their house, feel free to reach out to us. I used to talk right from the start about foreclosure, and I got a lot of angry people, so I think the softer approach works as far as softening them up a little bit and then they don’t get so defensive.
Now, of course we follow up extensively with postcards sent to them. Actually, we take a picture of the house and it gets attached to a postcard that gets sent to them over a six month period eight times. You also do text messages to them to see if we can help them out in the process.
So let’s go over a little bit why do people get in these foreclosure situations? Actually one of the reasons I started this website was a couple, two, three years ago, I was so disenchanted with people coming to me at the last moment in a foreclosure situation, and I’m thinking if they only could have reached out to me sooner as opposed to when the house is already going to be lost, maybe I could help them out. So I figured, well, I get this website out there and people will come to me, and we can try to help them with their foreclosure problems. That’s usually not the case. So what I do is go to them as soon as I know a foreclosure process has started.
Why do people get in these situations? There’s so many different reasons. I’ve seen reasons that some people probably had never even thought about. For example, a parent or someone in the family had passed away, and the heirs are out of the area and the mortgage payment goes unpaid, didn’t even know maybe there was a mortgage on the property, and it goes unpaid for quite awhile, or kids inherit the house and either don’t realize that there’s a mortgage on the property or just stopped paying… Hi, a lot of reasons.
Sickness can be a reason. People lose time on their job, fall behind on their payments, and just can’t make their payments and can’t get caught up, so sickness is one. Unfortunately in our society today, gambling is very prevalent and that is a problem. Some people lose their house because of gambling debts.
I’ve always said it’s one of three things when people get in financial problems, pretty much gambling, drugs or alcohol and/or fool around on on a significant other. Drinking can be a problem. People lose their focus, lose their ability to pay, lose their jobs. Drugs, of course we know what that situation is, totally screws up their life. It’s also when people fall out of relationships. Sometimes you had two people pay on their monthly mortgage payment, now there’s only one. They can’t afford it. They fall behind.
What else we got? Sickness, gambling, drugs, alcohol. Oh, moving away because of their job. They had to move out of the area. They had to move quick and they can’t make two mortgage payments, and for whatever reason they can’t get their house sold, so that’s a problem.
Can we think of any others? Yeah. Sometimes when the houses in such disrepair, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with trying to sell their house conventionally through a realtor, and so they come to us because they’re just too embarrassed to sell it in a terrible situation where maybe it’s full of junk, it’s been neglected. So there’s a lot of reasons.
Hey, reach out to us. Check out our website, www.heartlandbuyshouses.com. Our phone number is 1-800-255-8250. Thank you very much today for watching our video.