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Motion of the Council of Allegheny County requesting that the General Assembly consider and enact legislation either to regulate certain entities that undertake real estate wholesale transactions through the creation of a licensure system and establishment of required disclosures relating to these transactions, or to statutorily authorize Allegheny County to do so, in order to provide protections to homeowners from undesired solicitation and its deleterious effects.
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Whereas, increasingly over the past several years, homeowners within Allegheny County have been increasingly subjected to offers to buy their homes in quick cash deals, which often involve high-pressure and frequently deceptive sales techniques to convince homeowners to sell their homes for far less than fair market value; and
Whereas, many homeowners have been victims of predatory and aggressive techniques in these quick sale transactions, and some are being dragged into court to perform under contracts they did not understand, or that they only signed after being subjected to high-pressure and deceptive sales tactics; and
Whereas, wholesalers frequently target especially vulnerable homeowners: seniors, those who do not speak or read English, heirs who are still grieving lost family members, and those who are at risk of mortgage foreclosure or tax sale; and
Whereas, these wholesalers, who operate largely anonymously behind layers of LLCs, often are not the parties actually buying someone’s home; instead, they frequently make an offer to buy from a homeowner, and then assign or sell that sales contract to someone else, for a fee and/or a higher price. In these scenarios, the homeowner far less than their house is actually worth, and the wholesaler is unjustly enriched with thousands or more often tens of thousands of dollars of profit on a single deal; and
Whereas, some wholesaler LLCs intentionally move in and out of legal existence, in the process making it difficult or impossibl...
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