Buying property with title defects is a discount play, not a construction play. The house may be in perfect shape — what’s broken is the paperwork: a missing probate, a judgment lien, a chain of title with three bad family deeds in it. That property can’t close on the open market, hasn’t sold in years, and the seller knows it. That’s why a $5,000 offer gets accepted.
Logan Fullmer runs about 200 of these deals a year out of a San Antonio office, buying without title insurance, curing the defect, then reselling at market. His core point isn’t that curative work is hard — it’s that most wholesalers already do it by accident and forget to reprice the deal, so they collect $20K instead of $100K.
Below: the property value floor that makes the legal spend work, the all-in cost math on a typical deal, how to price a fractional interest you buy from one heir, and the exact framing for going back to the seller after the title commitment lands.
Key takeaways
- Fullmer won’t touch property worth less than $150,000–$200,000, because legal fees and seller payments stay roughly fixed no matter what the house is worth — the spread has to absorb them.
- A typical deal: ~$20K in old mortgage or tax payoff, $10–20K to the seller, ~$10K in legal fees. All-in near $50K on a house worth $200K as-is, listed at $180K to move fast.
- The money is in the trade-down. Once the title company surfaces the defects, go back to the seller: if you cure it, I pay the contract price; if I cure it, the price comes down.
- Buying one co-owner’s fractional interest for $500 caps your downside at $500 against a $50K–$100K upside. If the cure fails, list jointly with the remaining owner and split proceeds.
- A third to half of these deals aren’t complicated — two owners, one judgment. Pass on the 20- and 40-owner fights until you have reps.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Logan Fullmer of ARP USA (arpusa.com) on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Issa Hanna.
Why Legal Distress Beats Physical Distress
Physical distress is priced by every flipper in your market. Legal distress isn’t, because most buyers can’t close on it at all.
Fullmer’s target list is specific: unpaid taxes and title problems, owners fighting each other, judgments and liens that outvalue the property, breaks in the chain of title, missing probates, and decades-old family deeds that were done without a lawyer and are sitting in the chain, defective.
“When you see a house needing to be flipped, I’ll take that one,” he said. “But I buy really nice houses sometimes. It’s more about the legal and technical distress.”
The common thread is that the property can’t sell easily and hasn’t sold in a long time. That’s the entire justification for offering nearly nothing. You aren’t lowballing a functioning asset — you’re bidding on something with no other bidders, because a normal buyer’s lender and title company will both kill the deal.
One structural note worth copying: the model is asset-agnostic. Fullmer doesn’t keep what he buys. A crummy mobile home or a vacant lot in the middle of nowhere gets cured and sold, and the cash gets redeployed into the commercial real estate he actually wants — office, industrial, and now some retail. The curative business is the engine; the portfolio he keeps is chosen separately, on his own terms.
That separation matters for anyone considering this niche. You are not building a rental portfolio out of clouded-title inventory. You are running a manufacturing business that produces clean title and turns it into cash.
The Value Floor: Why He Won’t Touch Anything Under $150K
Fullmer’s rule: he doesn’t like to touch property worth less than $150,000 to $200,000. The reason is arithmetic, not snobbery.
The costs of curing a clouded title real estate deal are close to fixed. An attorney charges roughly the same to strip a judgment or handle a missing probate on a $90,000 house as on a $250,000 one. The payment you make to the seller is set by their willingness to walk, not by the appraisal. Old tax and mortgage payoffs are what they are. So on a cheap property, the same $30K–$50K of costs eats the entire spread.
Here is how a deal at the floor pencils out, using his own example:
- Old mortgage or back taxes owed: about $20,000
- Paid to the seller: $10,000 to $20,000
- Legal fees for the cure: about $10,000
- All-in: roughly $50,000
Note what the exit is measured against: value as it sits, not ARV. If the house is worth $200,000 in current condition, he lists at $180,000 and, in his words, “it’ll vanish.” That underprice is deliberate — speed of resale is part of the return, because the capital needs to recycle into the next cure. Profit lands near $100,000.
Run that same structure on a $120,000 house and you’re all-in around $45,000 to make maybe $50,000, with the same legal risk and the same 120-plus day cycle. The work doesn’t scale down.
They still got their $20,000 assignment fee and I made $100,000, because I went back to the seller and said: what you’re trying to do is sell this property and do no work. If you solve all that, I’ll pay you what our agreement was. But if I’ve got to go do all that work, I need a better price.
— Logan Fullmer, ARP USA
Buying a House Without Title Insurance: Pricing Extreme Risk
If you can’t get title insurance at closing, you price for total loss. That’s the whole discipline.
Fullmer’s pitch to a seller is blunt and fast: “You can’t sell this and I’ll buy it, but I’m only giving you five grand and I can’t even get title insurance. So it’s extreme risk. But I’ll come to your house this afternoon with five G’s and a deed.”
The self-selection is the point. Sellers who say no aren’t his sellers — they still believe the property has retail value to them. The ones who say yes are done. They’re walking away and they could not care less. Trying to convert the first group is wasted marketing spend.
The fractional-interest version is even cleaner. Where a house has two co-owners — say a brother and sister who aren’t getting along, on a property worth a couple hundred thousand — offer the one who wants out $500 for their share.
“I know it sounds appalling, but it happens every day. It gets accepted,” Fullmer said. Your exposure is $500 against a shot at $50,000 to $100,000. If the cure fails and you can’t get the other owner to cooperate on a sale, the fallback isn’t a total loss: call them, propose listing the property jointly on the MLS, and split proceeds by interest. You keep your share, they keep theirs, and you still make money without ever owning the whole thing.
Understand what you’re accepting. Taking a deed without insurance means you own whatever is in that chain — liens, claims, unknown heirs. Whether that’s an acceptable risk is a decision to make with your own attorney, in your own state, on the specific chain in front of you.
The Trade-Down: Renegotiating Price After the Title Search
This is the part most operators are already doing for free.
Wholesalers and flippers going direct to seller run into these deals constantly. They chase down an affidavit of heirship. They help the seller pull a birth certificate or a death certificate. They coordinate with the title company for six weeks. That is curative work. What they don’t do is change the price.
“They still got their $20,000 assignment fee and I made $100,000, because I went back to the seller and framed it out well,” Fullmer said.
The framing he uses, after the title commitment comes back with exceptions:
- What you set out to do was sell this property and do no work.
- The title company has now revealed problems that have to be dealt with by somebody.
- If you solve all that, I’ll pay exactly what we agreed to.
- If I have to go do that work, I need a better price. I can’t do it for free — it’s your work, not mine.
When sellers stall on the logic, he switches to the yard: someone’s going to mow it. If you mow it, you get paid. If I mow it, I can’t charge anyone — that’s just my responsibility. Whoever does the mowing gets paid for the mowing. It lands because it’s obviously fair, and it moves the conversation off “you’re retrading me” and onto “who is doing the labor.”
Two conditions make this work. First, you have to be genuinely willing to pay the original price if the seller cures it themselves — most won’t, and that’s fine. Second, the reprice has to happen after the title company documents the defects, not on a hunch. The commitment is your evidence.
Deal Selection: Which Title Problems to Take and Which to Pass
The limiting belief in this niche is thinking you need to learn every defect before you close one. You don’t.
By Fullmer’s estimate, a third to half of the deals his offices do aren’t complicated. Two owners. One judgment. Small stuff. Those are the ones that are actually easy to fix, and they’re the ones a first-timer should be filtering for.
His starter profile: two co-owners who aren’t getting along, a house worth a couple hundred thousand, and one of them willing to walk away for almost nothing. “That’s a low hurdle,” he said. “You’ll fix that easier than you think.”
The pass list is equally clear. When an inbound call turns out to be 20 or 40 owners who are all fighting, hold it for later. Learning all of this can take a decade — he says he’s still learning new things — and a multi-party family war is not the deal you learn on. There’s no partial credit on a cure that stalls for two years.
Worth knowing if you were planning to sell curative work as a service: the math doesn’t support it. Fullmer might spend 10 hours on a deal that produces $100,000. “If a customer comes to me and says, hey, can you help me solve this? I’m like, yeah, it’s 10 grand an hour. That’s unreasonable.” Attorneys will do the work, but they think about it like lawyers, which he says gets in the way of finding the creative path to an insurable title.
The takeaway for operators: the value here is captured through equity, not billed hours. If you’re doing the curative work, own the deal.
Running It at Volume: Inventory, Cycle Time, and Structure
At scale the operation looks like inventory management, not deal hunting.
The numbers Fullmer gave: roughly 200 deals a year through the office, about $40 million and 220 units in inventory at the time of the interview — higher than he likes — and a conversion cycle of 120 to 150 days from acquisition to cured resale. The goal is turning the inventory more than once a year. That cycle time is why the exit gets priced to sell rather than to maximize; capital tied up in a cured house is capital not buying the next defect.
The org structure is worth studying. He recruited young partners, trained them when they were hungry and short on capital, then spun each one into a separate LLC that he helped capitalize while they hired and ran it. That produced six businesses operating out of one office building he bought out of bankruptcy. His own role compressed to high-level legal strategy and finance — nobody needs him to review KPIs or explain a special warranty deed anymore.
The capital discipline is the least glamorous and probably most transferable part. While the business was earning $200,000 to $400,000, he lived on about $50,000 a year and paid more in taxes than he distributed to himself, for years. Growth came from credit lines, not outside equity.
“I never wanted to be that poor investor, but I was plowing money back into the business because it was my golden goose,” he said. “Be disciplined. Do this for four, five, six, seven years. When that happens, it snowballs so fast.”
Frequently asked questions
Can you actually close a purchase without title insurance?
Yes — Fullmer does it routinely, taking a deed and paying cash with no policy issued. But you are accepting whatever is in that chain of title: liens, judgments, unknown heirs, defective prior deeds. There is no carrier standing behind you if a claim surfaces.
The way to make that survivable is to price it as if the property could be a total loss. If your entire exposure on a co-owner’s interest is $500, an unrecoverable cure costs you $500. Whether an uninsured purchase is workable in your state, and on your specific chain, is a question for a real estate attorney — not something to decide from an article.
How much should I offer one heir or co-owner for their fractional interest?
Fullmer’s number for a starter deal is $500 for a co-owner’s share. It sounds insulting and it gets accepted regularly, because the person taking it has already decided they’re done with the property and knows they can’t sell it alone.
The reason to keep it small isn’t greed — it’s downside control. $500 at risk against a $50,000 to $100,000 upside is a bet you can afford to lose several times while you learn. If the cure stalls, you still hold a real ownership interest and can propose listing the property jointly with the remaining owner and splitting proceeds.
What is the smallest property value worth pursuing on a clouded-title deal?
Fullmer’s floor is $150,000 to $200,000 in as-is value. Below that, the roughly fixed costs — about $10,000 in legal fees, $10,000 to $20,000 to the seller, plus whatever old taxes or mortgage balance has to be cleared — consume the spread.
Underwrite against current condition value, not ARV. The exit here is a fast market sale of a cured but unrenovated property, priced slightly under comparable value so it moves quickly and frees the capital.
How do I renegotiate a purchase price after the title commitment comes back with defects?
Wait for the title company to document the problems, then go back to the seller with a clean either/or: if you resolve these items, I’ll pay the price we agreed on; if I resolve them, the price has to come down to cover that work.
Keep it about labor rather than value. Fullmer’s yard analogy does the work — whoever mows the lawn is the one who gets paid for mowing it. Most sellers won’t take on a probate or a judgment payoff themselves, which is exactly why they’ll accept the lower number.
Which title problems should a first-timer avoid entirely?
Skip anything with 20 or 40 owners who are all in conflict. Those deals can take years, generate real legal bills, and offer no partial credit if the cure never completes.
Target the simple end instead: two owners, one judgment, one missing signature, a small unresolved estate. Fullmer estimates a third to half of the deals his offices close fall into that category, which means you can build a real business without ever solving the hardest cases.
The bottom line
If you already go direct to seller, your next move isn’t learning a new acquisition channel — it’s pulling the last five deals where the title company surfaced heirship or lien problems and asking whether you repriced the contract or just did the work for free. That habit change is worth more than any new marketing spend.
