They can't hate me that much… can they???
I live in a triplex in LA rso where all three tenants have been here almost two decades. The owner/landlords put the place on the market for 2M over a year ago. After slowly lowering the asking price to 1.5M, they finally sold at the end of last year.
They knew I wanted to buy the place and they knew I was willing to pay 1.3M but I had to wait until November '25 to have the money for it. Literally the last week of Oct '25 they got an offer. They didn't go into escrow until mid Dec, and escrow just closed and I see the price was 995,000. The company that bought the place was created the day after the landlord told us they had an "offer".
I'm wondering if there's any way that this makes sense other than they really didn't want to sell to me? Could they be somehow making money off the backend if it's an investor? Sell to themselves as something else for tax purposes?
Anybody got any clues?
The whole thing has been really strange and my landlords have always been shady and weird so we don't have much clear info about anything unfortunately.
Why on earth would my landlord sell my rental to someone else for 300k less than my offer?
byu/JellySerious inRealEstate
Posted by JellySerious
4 Comments
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and it seems like they just wanted to be rid of it.
Impossible to know the exact motivations of the seller.
LLCs being created post offer acceptance is common — no point in creating an LLC for a property whose offer you don’t get accepted.
None of us can know what the initial offer was. Often the settled price is lower because either problems were found during inspection (quite likely, in an older building) or the appraisal came in lower. Could be a combination of those factors.
If you wanted to lock the place up but not open escrow until a future date, you should have submitted an offer with substantial non-refundable earnest money. “I want to make you an offer but won’t have the money for a while” is not likely to get you under contract.
There likely were other considerations.
Landlord could have created the LLC to sell it to at a calculated loss for a tax deduction. Did the management, repairs, payment address, etc. change? If not, there’s your answer.