SitemapBuying a home is a long and difficult process in and of itself. A quicker route is through a land contract but is it safe?
A land contract allows people who can't get a loan for various reasons to still be able to buy a house. Instead of paying back the bank or a lender, the buyer pays the homeowner or a company each month until the house is paid off. Sounds good, right? A lot of people in the Valley thought so. "We were completely snowed or, as they say, bamboozled," Craig Gilchrist said. He's a victim of a land contract gone wrong. In 2007, Gilchrist and his wife saw an ad in the paper to lease to own a house. They jumped on the opportunity. "I had no suspicion that anything was not the way it was supposed to be," he said. That is, until move-in day. Gilchrist and his family were evicted from the house even though they paid $1,500 a month for nearly three years before moving in. "For the entire time that we had been paying our mortgage, what we thought was our mortgage, he had never been paying anything," he said. The house wasn't officially in their name yet so they couldn't do anything about it. His story isn't uncommon in the Youngstown area. "In my view, it's criminal and something needs to be done about it," said Ian Beniston, president of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation. Mahoning County has 1,276 land contracts and Trumbull County has 2,706. To read the full story from WKBN, click here.