Ralph Roberts, named realtor of the year in 1999, files for bankruptcy protection
The prominent US real estate broker Ralph Roberts, named by Time magazine as the “best-selling realtor in America” in 1999, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
The personal and business Chapter 11 filings were made after a lawsuit filed against him last year by a group of investors, his bankruptcy lawyer told the local paper, The Macomb Daily.
“There were attempted settlements. They did not work out,” attorney Hannah McCollum said. Members of the group sued him in February 2011 to recover their investment in his real estate investments.
Documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit show he has assets of $1.8 million and liabilities of $73.2 million. However, his attorney explained that $6.5 million listed next to each of the 11 people with the largest claims — including his mother — is the total amount the group claims it is owed.
“We think it’s much less than that,” McCollum said.
Roberts, of Clinton Township, sold his first home aged 18, some 37 years ago.
Selling 600 homes a year at a $US115,000 average price earned him Time magazine’s title of top realtor in the country in 1999.
He co-authored nine books on real estate sales and investing, including Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman, 1997, Flipping Houses for Dummies, 2006 and Foreclosure Investing for Dummies, 2007.
In 1999, when spruiked as the highest-selling realtor in America, Roberts spoke in Sydney at the Real '99 conference to advise local agents on the art of the deal.
He’d recently sold a house to Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, the controversial rapper, who’d bought a $US450,000 Detroit residence.
Roberts estimated that probably 80% of agents, at any one time, are in a sales slump.
In 2004, a quote from the website of his former company, Ralph Roberts Real Estate, said, “Ralph Roberts is to residential real estate what Babe Ruth was to baseball; what Johnny Carson was to late night television; and what McDonald’s has been to the fast food industry — except Ralph is better.”
After running into some difficulties in 2007, Ralph Roberts Real Estate re-incorporated as Ralph Roberts Realty LLC with a business model attracting investors and flipping homes, with no lines of credit, charging a “finder’s fee” and then splitting the profits when homes were re-sold.
Then the toxic mortgage housing market crashed.
“He (was) building himself up from the bottom, in a market you can’t sell in. Investors immediately said he defaulted,” McCollum told The Macomb Daily.
Roberts also lost it all in the sky-high interest rates in the late 1970s, when he lost his own Detroit house to foreclosure.
"But through lean years and good years I've tried to see troubles as opportunities, not just as problems,” he told his 1999 Australian audience.
Roberts presumably still sees himself as a master of transforming crises into opportunities.
