This was incredibly apparent to me when I recently bought a house.
The seller was foreign, and had picked and escrow company that hadn't been in business for long. I was originally worried it was a scam and someone was trying to run off with my money, but that wasn't the gig.
The two owners of the escrow company had owned multiple other escrow companies that were shut down. No complaints against them, so it's not like they were taking people's money and running.
The escrow 'company' didn't have any sort of need for a paper trail of where money came from when buying my house. I imagine if I had shown up with a suitcase full of cash speckled with blood and coke they wouldn't have cared.
There's likely no record of where all the money came from for me, (tech money) nor any of the other foreign buyers they regularly service. They're likely shut down again and opened with a new name.
The escrow company generally should do proper KYC work, and does fall under AML/CFT directives.
But the where did your money come from (that some folks are used to) comes from LENDER requirements.
Lenders underwrite based on a set of facts, ideally backed up by what actually happens in escrow. So if the escrow company get's a wire from a hard money lender instead of from your bank (same $100K) that's going to be a big difference in lender eval prior to funding (they don't want you borrowing your money from another lender - usually a sign you faked your ability to save, increased DTI etc).
>The escrow company generally should do proper KYC work, and does fall under AML/CFT directives.
I'm claiming that some of the escrow companies are only in business for a short period of time, only to pop up under a different name with one or two of the owners being different. Wouldn't that mitigate a lot of the risk of non compliance?
It's not anyone elses business where the money came from! If you were engaged in crime then the investigations of the actual crimes can eventually catch up with you. Expecting crime to get caught by surveilling your finances when you have no reason to be suspected of a crime is like expecting to scan your private correspondence for evidence of a crime.
It depends on the jurisdiction and the particular transaction.
In the US, for instance:
> financial institutions covered by the final rule must take reasonable steps to: [...] (3) determine the source(s) of funds deposited into the private banking account and the purpose and expected use of the account;
It does. I was cautioned that due to FINcen "you cannot buy a house with crypto", luckily all of the gains I had made were tracked by a "sufficiently reputable" platform that it wasn't an issue.
Wait, was that for a mortgage? I bought a house outright with cash that had been moved from Gemini (US crypto exchange) to Schwab less than two weeks before and the title company never had any questions about it.
It is quite literally the lender’s business, as their decision to lend to you is absolutely contingent upon their confidence that the money came from a legitimate, stable source.
Not to nitpick, but the "stable" part isn't necessarily true. If the money is just being used for a down payment, and not being cited as recurring income, they wouldn't care whether it's stable.
Side note: I still can't make sense of why lenders care about the money's source being legitimate but the title company doesn't, per my experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28163885
Well, I was conflating two things for simplicity’s sake.
They care that the down payment came from legitimate savings with a documented history, to ensure it’s not from another loan they’re not aware of.
And they care that your reported income is stable (you’re reliably employed with a reasonably predictable income stream) so they can reasonably expect you’ll continue to be able to make monthly payments.
Either your agent/attorney or the seller's agent/attorney did.
And you had the legal right to choose the company providing almost all of those services. Well, in most states you do. Federal law provides that you can choose a subset of them.
We recently sold a home. We did choose the escrow company. Neither we, nor the buyers, used an agent/attorney. We did the same thing when buying our new house. No agents or attorneys involved and the sellers chose the escrow company. These days, with the Internet, it really is tremendously easy to fill out all the paperwork correctly and do everything yourself. The total time we spent from beginning to end was a few hours total, which saved tens of thousands of dollars on each transaction. 10/10 I’d forgo using an agent/attorney next time as well.
Not only that, you absolutely should shop the optional services (like title, escrow, etc.) We saved thousands in fees because me and my agent made a couple of phone calls to get competing bids after the seller (really the sellers agent) tried to direct us to a very expensive set of options.
Go for it. But unless you pay (or it is a cash-only deal), it's a violation of federal law and the buyer can come after you later on for 3x the cost. End of story.
Oh wow, I've only ever sold to cash buyers & come to think of it my preferred title company wasn't even a point of negotiation. I suppose it does protect the buyer more, I just like working with a competent and fast title company
>The escrow 'company' didn't have any sort of need for a paper trail of where money came from when buying my house.
Why in the world would they? I’ve bought and sold lots of properties, and that has happened literally zero times ever. If the escrow company asked me where my money came from, I’d tell them to get fucked and I’d use a different company. It’s absolutely none of their business.
That's not my point. My point is there is now no record of where the money came from, anywhere.
If I go deposit 500k in a TDAmeritrade account or at Wells Fargo, you can bet it's going to be sent out to the IRS or have a flag flipped somewhere and that transaction is going to be recorded.
If the funds come from another account in your name and are not cash very unlikely for there to be further reporting, there already is a good paper trail.
Escrow companies keep good records as well on flows in and out on a file. So checkable if needed.
But what i'm saying is all these escrow companies used to buy multi-million dollar houses are out of business. they don't exist anymore. Did they transfer their records to some government agency?
The current owners just do some extra paperwork that asserts the original papertrail that was lost, basically that's it. The downside is that it usually results in a significantly lower sale price if you try to sell down the road because there is a risk of contested ownership that will result in legal fees or losing the property (very rare). I did work for what I later learned were shady real estate/escrow companies some years back, maybe it changed since then.
They're required to investigate and possibly file a suspicious activity report if they thought a transaction or a series of transactions was (wait for it...) suspicious. They might simply believe "there is no way this guy has $500k." This kind of report doesn't necessarily result in any kind of action that the client will notice, even if the investigators decide to pass it on to the government.
This is all governed by laws like the Bank Secrecy Act. There's been a push in recent years to make it personal with bank personnel, who are reminded that they're subject to civil and criminal penalties if they look the other way and knowingly let the wrong kind of transaction through.
Do you feel like you understand the banking system well enough to make a comment like that? I'm still just describing the basics to you. There's ample information online, so have at it...
Germany too: https://www.oh-projekt.com/ - owned by Ajmal Rahmani [1], Afghan MP, son of Mir Rahman Rahmani, speaker of the Afghan parliament. Nephew to a Northern Alliance general - Baba Jan - who conveniently held a part of Bagram airbase until 2001, so that he supposedly had a nice jumpstart for his trucking business. Trucking business got fined for some millions of dollars after he bribed his way to US army officials (10k/month) [2,3]. Noone cares, probably because he has bought a cypriotic passport [4] – yet every politician wants to tackle real estate price (certainly not lowered by blood money searching for a safe haven) and feels a duty to the poor Afghan people.
US immigration system is fundamentally broken. You'll be asked no question about your source of income if you buy property in excess of half a million dollars- you'll get expedited green card service instead. People with black money all over the world make use of such loopholes- and guess what- they continue to screw US once they are here.
Meanwhile you have hundreds of thousands of hard-working individuals with clean tax records and no criminal history in immigration limbo for 10-20 years- many of whom never get back any of the SS or medicare tax they contribute.
>> if you buy property in excess of half a million dollars- you'll get expedited green card service instead
It’s not quite like that. You need to create jobs. At least 10 of them [1]:
“ aliens who have invested or are actively in the process of investing $1 million (or $500,000 in targeted employment areas) in a new commercial enterprise that will benefit the U.S. economy and create at least 10 full-time positions for qualifying employees. These aliens are also called ‘EB-5 immigrant investors’ “.
The Constitution protects the private property. Yet, every year there are a number of burglaries. Does it follow the Constitution encourages the burglars?
The burglars are not taking advantage of a loophole in the constitution though.
Let me give you an example- some investors bypass the employment provision mentioned here by presenting construction workers, or even tenants on the property as employees.
I sometimes wonder how many of the commenters actually read the article itself. All the discussion in comments is about residential properties when in the article it clearly says:
"
Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions.
"
Or another:
“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”
At least in Vancouver there has been a pretty dramatic shift from the days of Christy Clark to try and raise the transparency of house ownership. We've still got a long way to go but it looks like those politicians are being shown the door.
Due to a quirk in treaties, the US does not have to notify other countries about US assets held by non-US-citizens. This makes the US the ideal place to hide money for most of the world.
Ironic that as a US citizen they want to know and audit all accounts. Try opening a bank account in Switzerland with a US passport. The US goes so far that foreign banks would rather not deal with you at all. Says something about the way Citizens are viewed in this country.
I am unsympathetic to the reaction of Swiss banking officials who are apparently deeply emotionally affected by the imposition to report on the financial assets of wealthy people with financial interests in the US. Switzerland's history of providing financial services to the very worst people in the world is not much of a bush to hide behind.
It's not just Switzerland. France also makes it so difficult to hold an account that it's not worth it. It's understandable since the paperwork they have to do is also enormous for the small profit they would make.
The only country where it is actually fairly simple is Canada, because Canadian banks already have the infrastructure to automatically tattle on you to Uncle Sam and the IRS.
These requirements apply to all American citizens, not only wealthy people. I lived in Switzerland briefly and had a bank account there; it was closed (along with all other Americans' accounts) because the bank didn't want the burden of reporting.
As gutitout said, "the US goes so far that foreign banks would rather not deal with you at all." And the worst burden of that falls on average citizens living abroad, not on the wealthy who just move their money to a different haven.
> These requirements apply to all American citizens, not only wealthy people. I lived in Switzerland briefly and had a bank account there; it was closed (along with all other Americans' accounts) because the bank didn't want the burden of reporting.
Yup, can confirm - a large majority of smaller banks will not open a bank account for US citizens in Switzerland. The few larger ones will, but there's extra paperwork you need to fill out.
Sorry about the confusion. I meant all Americans' accounts with that bank, not all Americans' accounts in the entire country.
That link also confirms what I said: it clearly says the reporting requirements apply to all "U.S. citizens and residents with...any foreign financial accounts", and it provides a list of some banks that still accept American account holders because many do not.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I have a close friend who moved back to Taiwan from the US and many banks have told her exactly this. She want to renounce her US citizenship because it is making life hard for her.
(Note: I am pro all the reporting requirements. But the parent comment is factually true.)
Indeed. FATCA is an extreme annoyance and makes Americans persona non grata in a lot of countries. Try getting a bank account or opening a mortgage as an American permanently abroad or an accidental one.
(I wish beyond FATCA that taxation on Americans domiciled outside of the country would be ended. Such a waste, and I say this as someone who supports taxation for public goods.)
> They are taxed on bringing that money into the US though
Which they (almost) never have to do. If they need cash in America, they take out super-low-interest loans.
> the owners of it are taxed once the money moves to individuals
Again, that's technically true but only poor schnooks who keep their money in Vanguard index funds are paying those taxes. The wealthy have more sophisticated tax strategies.
GDPR is a regional law, there's no international treaties that compel any non-European entity to follow it. I don't know why most Europeans have a hard time understanding this.
Similar law exists in the US in California, with the difference being that it's possible for a federal court out there to claim jurisdiction if I, as a non-Californian but American resident citizen, do business with Californian customers.
Not to sound dismissive but I am glad you are noticing this since us non-Citizens also have to fill the crazy FATCA forms like criminals and we have to swear we are OK according to some US law that some of us can't even read.
So, yeah, thanks US for making our EU bureaucracy a bit stuffier!
I wonder how US Citizens would feel about filling a form for the Chinese state with each financial institution. They would say it's an insult! Because it is.
You shouldn’t be able to buy property using an LLC. Real people’s legal names should be required on every transaction. If you’re later found to be facilitating a transaction for a money launderer you go to jail too.
Because the primary function of an LLC is limiting financial (not criminal) liability of the owners, and the liability of the directly named owner would not be limited.
Only 4 states in the US allow anonymous LLCs anyways: Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
The problem is that even with owner's identities, unless you follow the trail of money very far, it's hard to know whether the capital is clean or not.
It's not meaningless - but it is good to observe that there's a bit of a tragedy of the commons when it comes to state-wise incorporation requirements. The weakest link effectively dictates for the rest of the nation. Delaware has incredibly low incorporation fees, taxes and disclosure requirements - and thus every other state just has to shrug and take it due to federal control of limitations on interstate commerce.
I agree that LLCs can be abused. The answer to this is stronger enforcement of anti-money-laundering, not preventing LLCs from owning property.
But increasing investigation and enforcement of money laundering laws requires the political will of state prosecutors, who are usually elected officials. Only recently have prosecutors willing to actively go after this stuff (like AG Letitia James in NY).
LLCs have a useful function (allowing business that limit their owners personal exposure to the business's liabilities, and vice versa).
Sure, and for my part, I'm not OK w/ the current reality as you describe it and would strongly consider voting for an AG candidate with a platform that included going after shady LLCs.
An AG needs probable cause for a criminal charge to subpoena all intermediaries, and "shady LLCs" lack probable cause. Similarly, a federal money laundering charge requires an illicit origin, so since the state doesn't know the origin and has no probable cause on what specifically criminal (or non-criminal) origin there is, indiscriminately going after random property owners and random LLCs is going to get curb stomped by every judge in the union. Fishing expeditions don't cut it in this country.
Anonymity doesn't require a lack of paper trail. Only a benign paper trail.
Of course they wouldn't go trawling through LLCs. They would use probable cause established outside. LLCs are just a means for some crimes, not a cause in and of themselves.
Businesses don't have one owner. Think about all of the properties that a company like Apple owns.
Now, if you're specifically referring to residential properties, maybe.... although there are lots of mixed-use properties, and ownership of land can be separate from the house that's on it, etc
That might "solve" the Apple scenario but it's hardly universal. Many businesses lien or deal in land. For instance, mortgages as we know them would not exist without liens.
First, it destroys the entire mechanism of LLC protection.
Second, privacy is a human right. You should not be forced to list yourself in a publicly accessible database to own real estate. Needing to pay a trustee to avoid this is bad enough.
Registering the beneficial owners of entities privately with the government is as far as makes sense. Of course then we run into the problem that government isn't terribly incentivized to do enough analysis to catch the large scale evaders.
> Second, privacy is a human right. You should not be forced to list yourself in a publicly accessible database to own real estate. Needing to pay a trustee to avoid this is bad enough.
I think there is a core of truth here - individual persons should not be forever tied to business they've worked for. Everyone should always have the right to "walk away". However - while you're executing actions on behalf of a business you should not have a right to privacy of your actions - you are actively executing them and if you're doing shady or illegal things that should be knowable.
Freedom of speech doesn't free you from the consequences of that speech - and I think it's unreasonable to demand to be free from the consequences of your actions.
I do whole-heartedly agree with your final point though - it's the beneficiaries that should be on the hook as the first point of contact - agents of the company may be shielded by the company but the beneficiaries should achieve that shield by making themselves clear points of contact.
In the two states where I do business it's fairly easy to discover information about the ownership of an LLC or other corporate entity. As a real estate agent I do it all the time using publicly available sources.
As many others have noted, I’m talking about residential property only. Should have been clearer.
Money Laundering with commercial property is no doubt happening as well—no quick and easy solutions there—but faceless LLCs driving the real estate boom in single family homes is easily correctable.
Exactly! Imagine the mayhem these fools would cause by putting the names and addresses of every person with a telephone number in a freely searchable directory.
For my safety, I only want governments and organizations with unlimited legal resources to be able to divine private information like who owns taxable property or the people who own the companies who own the companies who own the congresspeople who oh no.
So... here's a wrinkle for you... unless you are a megacorp, a lender is generally going to want you to purchase in your name anyway, as that way your personal assets are on the line. At a minimum if you are purchasing through an LLC, your terms are not going to be as good as what you would get personally. This leaves out cash transactions though, where there's no lender involved who would have a KYC requirement. In my state of residence, there is actually a clause whereby you can purchase a property in your personal name and transfer it into the name of an LLC - because there are a whole slew of additional (legitimate) reasons as a landlord or commercial owner why you would want the property not in your personal name.
This might be an English-to-English translation problem, given that we have related but different systems of law... what I'm arguing above is that we defacto have this already. If a property is purchased in the name of an LLC, it doesn't take me any more time to find the registration and contact info than it does for me to find the human owner. In fact, in the two states I do business I'd argue it's easier because there will be more information available about a registered entity than about some John / Jane Doe.
As for a guarantee by a human director... well, yes, I guess that's my point - any mortgage company is going to want personal guarantees so it's a kind of self-policing system.
Where this gets weird is when you have an LLC owned by another LLC or some other kind of corporate entity, where there really aren't humans involved. And as I originally noted, cash transaction are an entirely different matter (and it can be eye opening just how many properties are purchased with cash)
Then you might just find a trustee's name in its place rather than the person that actually paid for the property. At least with LLCs you can usually lookup the owners of the LLC.
Also worth mentioning exemptions were created, it's only a matter of time before some lawyer/accountant creates new methods that exploit those exemptions.
All leaders are human. All humans are flawed. This is why government is always corrupted in someway. There is no way around it.
Additionally, the humans who fancy themselves as not flawed to the point where they are able to effectively lead and decide for others is a major red flag that they are not. Which to me is the great irony of democracy.
My guess? Sooner rather than later. I think a LOT of things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. Even those of us who make good money should be worrying about the direction things are going.
Nothing. That's not what's happening though. In a lot of places people buy houses and don't even bother renting them out. So not only buying prices are increasing, but renting prices are increasing too, because there is a group of people choking the supply for own financial gain.
>>Who cares who's buying it?
Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it, but another is that as a society we might want to take a step back and think what do we want out of our cities - if we collectively want affordable housing that people who live in a city can use, then allowing foreign investement funds to buy houses and then not live them is probably a bad idea.
This problem is vastly overstated. The real issue is that there simply aren't enough homes being built for all the people who want to live in desirable cities
But your property rights are not absolute. We don't allow people to dump toxic waste or burn tyres on their land, even if the land, the tyres and the toxic waste is entirely theirs. YOUR prerogative ends somewhere. I know indidualism is a tantalising idea but we live in a society with rules.
People collectively can decide(and frequently do decide) that the values important to a town, a city or an entire state are more important than your right to buy and leave property empty. There are many places which either forbid owning property entirely if you are a foreign national and don't actually live there, or impose a heavy tax on such purchases. Vacancy tax is a thing too.
Basically if a city(and by that I mean people of the city and its representatives) don't want houses to be sitting around empty, there are laws that can be introduced to force people to either move in, rent or sell the place, or they can keep the place standing empty at a heavy financial penalty if they wish. Like I said earlier - your prerogative ends somewhere.
Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty.
Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior. Just as GP mentioned - vacancy tax.
That's how the country works. It all depends on who has more people in agreement, and can make more of a rallying cry (and has moneyed interests on their side).
(I'm also in favor of land value tax as opposed to property tax to encourage productive use of land. And severely relaxing zoning restrictions)
> I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws
while that's true in this case of vacancy laws, it is not a universally applicable rule to be followed blindly.
Just because a large number of people agreed with a certain set of actions, doesn't mean those set of actions are good to undertake for society. Look at how venezuela got to the place they did, via democratic elections. The a majority of the people wanted the gov't handouts, and wanted nationalization of private property by force.
Correct, because you live in a society and the society imposes some obligations and constraints on you, as all societies have done since the dawn of humanity.
Honest question - are you writing these comments from like the depth of the Amazon jungle where laws don't apply? Because pretty much any civilized country in the world has laws that govern what you can or cannot do with your own private property, even the bastion of "freedom" that is US has loads of regulations about private property. If you live in a place like that and still think that you have some absolute control over actually yours property, then sadly, you are very mistaken.
So yes, I think we know where we stand now, except that it's not where you think it is.
As a licensed real estate agent in two states, I've got some familiarity with the topics at play in this article and discussion, but I'm not really clear on the point of the article. Can real estate be used to hide ill-gotten gains? Sure, as I'm sure plenty of other schemes can as well. What's interesting is that this article makes no mention of FIRPTA (IE: when they sell it they are going to get taxed on it) and each of the examples they give seem to be of someone who was eventually arrested or sanctioned (IE: the system is working as expected).
Escrow has come up several times in this discussion, as have the responsibilities of buyers and sellers... so look, at least in the two states where I do business, the selection of an escrow company is the mutual agreement of buyer and seller. In fact in some places a real estate agent can even act as your closing agent in place of an escrow company, if that's really what you want. Escrow is there to act as a neutral third party, and so long as you have proof of funds to close, it's generally irrelevant to them where those funds came from so long as it meets the conditions of the contract. Several people in this thread have voiced the opinion that escrow should have greater responsibilities related to KYC, but that would be a significant shift in their responsibilities and really opens some interesting cans of worms. If you have reason to suspect your escrow company is operating in a questionable way, there are state agencies to provide oversight.
What's maybe the more interesting angle to the topics of this article are the number of parties working to make real estate a completely automated process, IE: I click a button and I magically buy a property. As it stands, transactions generally have a lot of humans eyes on them, and when things don't look right (IE: fraud) it's that human attention that flags things, and I'm not sure (even as a former software engineer) how technology would have flagged some of the scenarios I've encountered.
Regarding people who were able to do the paperwork yourself and get the transaction through to a successful closing without issue, go buy a lottery ticket because your story is not typical - there's a reason why real estate agents and real estate attorneys exist. I spend an insane number of hours each week handholding buyers and sellers through complex transactions. The paperwork is the "easy" part, and it can still get you sued if someone forgets a checkbox. Water rights, property boundaries, zoning, feasibility, trade fixtures... it's incredible how many things I have to assist with, and there's absolutely no such thing as a "typical" transaction.
This is what real estate is for; they are and have been all my life stocks. We are ruled by Market Logic so that everything becomes quantified (Mbembe Necropolitics) including the Public Commons of Human Shelter.
That's because no properties are empty. The owner's nephew, a Canadian Citizen thanks to birth tourism, has the condo his uncle bought registered as his residence.
Converting property taxes to being calculated from unimproved value [0] accomplishes the same goal, while also removing disincentives on development and improvement.
Vacancy taxes tend to only hit the wealthy. There are certainly regressive taxes we should examine (like sales tax on staple goods) but vacancy taxes tend to target high earners pretty effectively.
Taxes are generally a good thing since they allow society to function well.
Richer people own more property than poor people. You're using an old saw that says taxation is worse for the poor but it's not. It's also simple to give breaks for purchases under x dollars or redemptions or for family homes that are occupied etc.
Sure, there are a bunch of corporate people who live in PO boxes in Delaware or Wyoming with no income who own vacant properties. Wouldn't want to burden those poor folks.
Who should be able to buy this vacation house: Markus, Swedish born foreigner who moved to America with his wife to work at an academic research lab or Liang, born in Saipan thanks to birth tourism (so a natural born US Citizen), using the money his parents managed to get out of China to grab as much real estate as he can.
Many of the OG "classical liberals" had a much more nuanced take on privatizing land, supporting something more like usage rights, rather than fee-simple or alloidal land titles (private enclosure of land beyond subsistence was associated with aristocracy):
"All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed."
- Thomas Jefferson
There is a wide range of middle-ground between the extremes of carving up the earth into micro-fiefdoms of absolute ownership, vs. all land being controlled by apparatchiks in the State Politburo. One of the most moderate is a tax on "ground rents", as proposed by Ricardo, Paine, and many others [0], to compensate the community for their exclusion, and fairly return the profits from "proximity value" (services and infrastructure that makes land more desirable). Even Milton Friedman referred to Land Value Tax as the "least worst tax" [1], with drastically reduced (if not zero!) "deadweight loss", compared to taxes on income or sales.
And as long as people keep buying them up for investments, keep building more. Just keep taking their money, and keep building enough that their investment keeps going down in value. Eventually they'll stop. And along the way, you'll also help people who can't afford housing.
There are two problems with this approach. One, a whole lot of people have the value of their home as part of their retirement plan. If you start driving that down as a deliberate policy, they aren't going to be happy. Two, we're currently facing a major shortage of building materials.
The seller was foreign, and had picked and escrow company that hadn't been in business for long. I was originally worried it was a scam and someone was trying to run off with my money, but that wasn't the gig.
The two owners of the escrow company had owned multiple other escrow companies that were shut down. No complaints against them, so it's not like they were taking people's money and running.
The escrow 'company' didn't have any sort of need for a paper trail of where money came from when buying my house. I imagine if I had shown up with a suitcase full of cash speckled with blood and coke they wouldn't have cared.
There's likely no record of where all the money came from for me, (tech money) nor any of the other foreign buyers they regularly service. They're likely shut down again and opened with a new name.