Designated SOB

It’s been a while, almost two years to be exact, since you’ve received one of our emails.  Honest to God, I’ve tried to retire from the apartment brokerage business.  Started clipping coupons.  Enjoying some prosperity built up in over 40 years in the brokerage business.  Bought fishing equipment.  Bought a Winnebago.  Travelled.  Did some writing. Got bored as hell.

And then something came up that was like a lightbulb going off in my head.  In 40 years of multifamily brokerage, I’d always considered people in the multifamily business to be pretty hard-nosed business people, willing and able to handle lots of difficult situations.  Tough folks.  Not taking crap from anybody. Aggressively handling problems and issues.  Then something came up that made me realize I had been wrong for over 40 years.  A lot, maybe even most, of you are too nice.  Too easy to get along with. 

At the end of last year I was approached by an associate who had a problem and asked for my help.  He was in an out-of-state land deal with a partner who was screwing him around and had been for over ten years.  The partner had taken funds out of the deal, misappropriated revenue, hid revenue.  He thought that his partnership agreement made him God and he could do anything he wanted.  I did my usual due-diligence research and discovered several things.  First, the partnership agreement was fishy.  Second, the bad partner had used some of the misappropriated money to buy a property for himself.  After contacting the partner himself, I advised my client to find an attorney.  I interviewed and investigated several in the area and finally recommended one who did a lot of partnership work.  After looking at all the research and documentation I had developed, the attorney agreed to go after the partner, who was represented by a well-connected attorney with lots of political pull.  After we served the partner, the heavy-hitter attorney decided he didn’t want to handle the case.  Shortly thereafter, the cheating partner fell all over himself trying to settle.  My client walked away with over $600,000 that he was never going to see otherwise.  My client was too nice.  What he needed was a Designated SOB.  Me.

And I had a ball!  More fun than any of my other deals in the past.  Then I ran across a tiny brokerage deal that I decided to take on for a friend.  I was shortly involved in a storm of issues including defunct homeowners’ associations, pipeline easements, flood plains, and a possible cemetery on the property where a previous owner had allegedly buried a missing woman he had allegedly murdered.  Again, it was a tiny deal and no agent would have worked on it due to the complexity, but I was having a blast!

To cut this email short, I’m now interested in working on a very few deals that require a Designated SOB.  If you have, or if you know of, any interesting or extremely complicated real estate related problems, let’s talk. It doesn’t need to be apartment-related.  Doesn’t even need to be in Texas.  If it gets my attention, and if I think I can be of assistance, maybe we can have a little fun. 

Call me at 214-405-3417 or email me at joe@lumbley.com and we can have a brief chat to see whether we can do some “bidness”.

Joe Lumbley

Dallas Income Properties, LLC

Texas Real Estate License #9002973

Bishop Arts District Office

819 N. Bishop

Dallas Tx 75208