The financial crisis still isn’t over for homebuyers in rent-to-own deals
“When the foreclosure crisis hit, there were few places it hit harder than Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs. Between 2006 and 2009, fully half the properties in some neighborhoods were in foreclosure. And real estate investors were snapping them up by the thousands, thinking they’d sell them for a quick profit when the market came back in a couple years. Well, the market took a whole lot longer than that to recover. And as the Great Recession dragged on, investors started looking for ways to squeeze some cash out of all those homes by luring would-be homeowners into risky rent-to-own deals. They thought they were buying into the American dream, but they ended up with anything but.”