Complaint Review: Morris Invest

Clayton Morris advertises his company Morris Invest as a "turnkey" rental company. He produces slick youtube videos and podcasts to sell the junk houses he picks up that no one else wants. We encountered him very new to real estated investing. We were suckered into paying cash for three unrehabilitated junk houses for a total of $155,000. Mr. Morris promised, verbally and in written purchase agreement contracts, to rehabilitate the houses as part of the purchase price, and place qualified tenants.

Morrise then did no rehab and placed unqualified tenants who did not pay rent. When contacted (numerous times by email, spoke once by phone) Morris said he was not responsible because he'd turned the houses over to a property management company (oceanpointe, since lost their license and went out of business) and it was their job to do the rehab and place tenants. After several contacts Mr. Morris and the people at his company stopped responding.

We had to hire an agent to get the tenants out, which cost several thousand dollars as two had to be evicted and we had to pay the other to leave. The tenants did further damage to the houses on their way out. We had to sell two of the houses for pennies on the dollar: One we paid $45,000 for we had to sell for $9,000, another we paid $42,000 for we sold for $19,000. We decided to fix up the 3rd ourselves and try to rent it. The purchase price from Morris was $45,000 which like the others was supposed to include repairs which were not done. It cost us an additional $29,000 to fix up to safe rent ready condition. However, it is in such a bad part of town that it is still unrented after 3 months on the market, lowering the rent, and offering incentives. We are total into the house $74,000 and it's market value is $45,000. Morris states on his videos and podcasts that the houses he sells are in "C" neighborhoods. In fact when we investigated with local people who understand the local nieghborhoods, all three were in "D" neighborhoods with terrible schools.

What was supposed to be an addition to our retirement income instead turned into a huge loss of our retirement savings.

Lessons learned: NEVER pay retail for a fixer-upper with a promise, even in writing, that it will be fixed up after the sale. NEVER trust someone just because they look and sound good on youtube and podcasts. Mr. Morris' verbal and written contracts turned out to be no good. Three lawyers told us that we had valid enforceable contracts and could get a judgement fairly easily, however Morris has had expert help from Garret Sutton protecting his wealth and it would be very difficult to collect. 

Another lesson: do some basic research on people before handing over large sums of money. In retrospect there were enough reviews on real estate websites of other's bad experiences that we should have been warned, if we'd taken the time to look.