If you take the time to shop around you will find that we are one of the best out there and will make it a lot easier for you to achieve your dream of owning a home for you and your family. There are a lot of different lease to own homes on the market today. Before you make a decision do yourself a favor and read our warning page on some of the pitfalls out there before you make a decision.
Lease to Own in general:
A lease to own is an agreement between a buyer and a seller that allows the buyer to lock in the future purchase price, save money for a down payment and buy the property in the future at current prices. These are commonly referred to lease option deals.
Our Lease to Own program in detail:
When you find a home you like all you have to do is call us and set up an appointment to see it. We will meet you at the home and let you walk through answering any questions that you have. If you are interested we will have you fill out an application and pay a $10 application fee. The $10 is what it cost us to run a credit check.
The application processing usually takes around a week to complete. During this period of time we check your credit, call your references, verify your employment and so on. After we gather all of the information we will then give you a call to duscuss matters such as rent credit and option money amount.
A rent credit is money that will be credited towards your down payment when you buy the house at the end of the lease. Usually around $100 per month so for a 36 month lease you will have $3600 to put towards the down payment on the house. Option money is kind of like a down payment. If you buy the home then you will get that money credited towards the down payment of the home. Usually the option money is 1-2 percent of the asking price of the house.
So lets say you bought one of our homes for $100,000 and you signed a lease to own agreement for 3 years. Your rent would be $1100.00 a month. Your security deposit is $1100.00 and option money is $1000.00. So to move in you would need $3200.00. If you purchase the home at the end of the lease you would have $3600 in credits, $1100 for the security deposit and $1000.00 in option money for the down payment. A total of $5,700 towards the down payment. Try paying rent somewhere else for 3 years and get $5700 back to buy a home.
Now if you dont buy the home you lose all of the rent credit and option money. Well that doesn't sound fair does it? If you look at it from our perspective you will see it is fair. We have to get something in return for investing our money for such a long period of time. If you don't buy the home it gives us little of our money back. If you do buy the home then we are very happy because we have all of our money back so we can reinvest it and buy more homes. So it is in your best interest to buy the home at the end of the lease. If you don't plan on buying the home we suggest you just find a place to rent instead. It will be a little cheaper than one of our homes. Again we don't want to be landlords and just rent our homes. Our goal is that you buy the home.