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.
I want to warn everyone who is reading this, DO NOT BELIEVE OR INVEST YOUR MONEY with Clayton Morris or his company 'Morris Invest'. He has been EXTREMELY negligent in his business. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my hard earned money with Morris Invest only to find out that me and many other of his investors have many homes that were never rehabbed and tenants of the very lowest quality have been placed in the units only to become squatters a few months into the lease due to extremely bad property management. Clayton Morris and Morris Invest fully endorsed a property manager who is literally stealing investors money. This is a scam, please do not give him your money like I did. I trusted him because I liked his podcast and felt comfortable. I made a big mistake. Do not do the same!
Take a look at the video and the pictures I have uploaded. These is supposed to be rehabbed duplex. It is heart breaking to me and my family. Who knows how much money I have lost.
We purchased a property through Morris Invest in November 2017. After closing on the property Oceanpointe was supposed to rehab the property, rent it, then manage it. We specifically asked prior for us to send an inspector post rehab to make sure everything is good before it was to be rented. On February 19 2018 we were told that the property has been rented since February 10th. We immediately asked for a copy of the lease and for an inspector to come in. To date we still haven't received a copy of the lease. We were able to send an inspector in on March 28th.
We have posted 2 videos regarding the results on youtube: https://youtu.be/_jn6G6cZsdE and https://youtu.be/Kb-UBZiZFvg. The morning after we sent an email to all personels that we know of in both morris invest and oceanpointe. So far we've seen 2 emails of them asking each other to work with us regarding the repairs. However, no one has actually talked to us anything about what they're going to do to fix this.
Working with Oceanpointe has been most frustrating. It took weeks to months to get anything done with them. We have called countless times in the last 4 months and only were able to talk to someone twice (not counting receptionist). They have never called back if we leave a message. Emails have been largely ignored.
After closing the title company Paramount changed to Monument. Apparently they are now a different company. Monument couldn't send us any documents because they didn't do the closing. Paramount now only exist in Michigan and not in Indiana. We have called the phone number provided to us many times. All we ever got was a voicemail without anyone ever calling us back. To date we still haven't received all documents that were supposed to be sent to us. There may be clouds on our title, which may be a problem should we ever sell the property.
The Morris Invest company (which also goes by the FinancialFreedomAcademy) targets and decieves out of town investors - selling dilapitated properties in war zones and stealing rehab dollars. He appears to escape legal responsibility to putting everything in the name of a different LLC.
The way this scam works is that you are led to believe you are buying properties in decent areas from the (presumably reputable) Morris Invest company. Photos are provided that in many cases are not the actual property.
Once the sale happens, the LLC name changes - but buyers are assured the unknown LLC is owned by Morris. In the end, I personally ended up purchasing from a company called Oceanpointe - which Clayton Morris now claims he has no responsibility for. At this point the OceanPointe company has disappeared with hundreds of thousands - and Morris no longer accepts my communication attempts.
As a summary, this real estate scam
- Property values are dramatically inflated and sold for thousands over value
- Property areas are misrepresented; they are advertised as "C" neighborhoods but have all turned out to be "D/F"
- Property conditions are misrepresented. Buyers were even prevented from doing outside inspections.
- Many properties turn out to have back Citations and tax liens
- Cash is taken for remodels
- Remodels are never done and money is never returned.
Clayton and Natali Morris have made millions off of claiming they can get their investors out of the rat race. They sell houses in depressed markets, claiming are good investments because they can get their team of people to rehab the property, fill with a tenant, and you sit back and collect your passive rent checks.
In reality, you buy a money pit that eats away at your savings. Clayton has certainly done this to hundreds of not thousands of investors, and the class action lawsuit is only making the lawyers rich.
I personally bought a house from Morris Invest, and had to sell it two years later after I found out that Oceanpointe property managers were feeding my rehab money back to me in the form of 'rent payments' from a non-existant tenant.
My property was trashed, there were squatters, and fines from the city due to public hazards.... I needed up selling the house for over a 10,000 loss, happy to get out from the very actively managed nightmare that was purchased.
There are others that lost much more. If you are looking for a solid investment, stay away from Clayton.
The Moriis Invest website is full of video examples of the representitive quality that investors could expect from the company with their turnkey investment. They promise new roofs, heating and hot water systems, fresh paint and floor finishes and anything necessary to make the house rent-ready, servisable and free from major repairs needs for the next several years. Instead, Morris along with their partner, Oceanpointe Investments, failed to renovate the houses and in 3 of the four units that I purchased, moved individuals into the houses without valid leases. In the one case that I did receive a lease, it was later discoved that a different person was living in the house than the person named on the lease.
A few months after my initial purchase I received violations notices from the city regarding health and safety violations to 3 of the 4 units. Within six months of the initial purchase all rent payments ceased although "tenants" were still living in the units. After numerous unsucessful attempts in contacting Morris and Oceanpointe about removing the non-paying tenants and completing the renovations to the units I was forced to termanate the management agreement and change property managers. In order to bring the units up to rent-ready and decent, safe and sanitary conditions and to evict the non-paying tenants I ended up spending close to $50,000 out of pocket for work that was supposed to have been completed by Morris. Both Morris and Oceanpointe have basically pointed the finger at each other for their failures and criminal activities.
I purchased 8 turn key rental properties from Clayton Morris and Morris Invest. Clayton advertised himself as a turnkey rental provider.
Clayton promised, through personal conversations with me, as well as his podcast, YouTube channel, and website, at least a 12% return, with rental properties in a C class neighborhood, complete rehab including new roof, new pex plumbing, and new mechanicals (furnace, water heater, etc.…).
What I wound up with was properties with no rehab completed, no tenants placed in most cases, D class neighborhoods at best, and nowhere near a 12% return. Now Clayton denies all responsibility, and seems to have moved on to a new market with new unsuspecting clients.
Morris Invest Reviews
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.
I want to warn everyone who is reading this, DO NOT BELIEVE OR INVEST YOUR MONEY with Clayton Morris or his company 'Morris Invest'. He has been EXTREMELY negligent in his business. I made the mistake of investing a lot of my hard earned money with Morris Invest only to find out that me and many other of his investors have many homes that were never rehabbed and tenants of the very lowest quality have been placed in the units only to become squatters a few months into the lease due to extremely bad property management. Clayton Morris and Morris Invest fully endorsed a property manager who is literally stealing investors money. This is a scam, please do not give him your money like I did. I trusted him because I liked his podcast and felt comfortable. I made a big mistake. Do not do the same!
Take a look at the video and the pictures I have uploaded. These is supposed to be rehabbed duplex. It is heart breaking to me and my family. Who knows how much money I have lost.
We purchased a property through Morris Invest in November 2017. After closing on the property Oceanpointe was supposed to rehab the property, rent it, then manage it. We specifically asked prior for us to send an inspector post rehab to make sure everything is good before it was to be rented. On February 19 2018 we were told that the property has been rented since February 10th. We immediately asked for a copy of the lease and for an inspector to come in. To date we still haven't received a copy of the lease. We were able to send an inspector in on March 28th.
We have posted 2 videos regarding the results on youtube: https://youtu.be/_jn6G6cZsdE and https://youtu.be/Kb-UBZiZFvg. The morning after we sent an email to all personels that we know of in both morris invest and oceanpointe. So far we've seen 2 emails of them asking each other to work with us regarding the repairs. However, no one has actually talked to us anything about what they're going to do to fix this.
Working with Oceanpointe has been most frustrating. It took weeks to months to get anything done with them. We have called countless times in the last 4 months and only were able to talk to someone twice (not counting receptionist). They have never called back if we leave a message. Emails have been largely ignored.
After closing the title company Paramount changed to Monument. Apparently they are now a different company. Monument couldn't send us any documents because they didn't do the closing. Paramount now only exist in Michigan and not in Indiana. We have called the phone number provided to us many times. All we ever got was a voicemail without anyone ever calling us back. To date we still haven't received all documents that were supposed to be sent to us. There may be clouds on our title, which may be a problem should we ever sell the property.
The Morris Invest company (which also goes by the FinancialFreedomAcademy) targets and decieves out of town investors - selling dilapitated properties in war zones and stealing rehab dollars. He appears to escape legal responsibility to putting everything in the name of a different LLC.
The way this scam works is that you are led to believe you are buying properties in decent areas from the (presumably reputable) Morris Invest company. Photos are provided that in many cases are not the actual property.
Once the sale happens, the LLC name changes - but buyers are assured the unknown LLC is owned by Morris. In the end, I personally ended up purchasing from a company called Oceanpointe - which Clayton Morris now claims he has no responsibility for. At this point the OceanPointe company has disappeared with hundreds of thousands - and Morris no longer accepts my communication attempts.
As a summary, this real estate scam
- Property values are dramatically inflated and sold for thousands over value
- Property areas are misrepresented; they are advertised as "C" neighborhoods but have all turned out to be "D/F"
- Property conditions are misrepresented. Buyers were even prevented from doing outside inspections.
- Many properties turn out to have back Citations and tax liens
- Cash is taken for remodels
- Remodels are never done and money is never returned.
Clayton and Natali Morris have made millions off of claiming they can get their investors out of the rat race. They sell houses in depressed markets, claiming are good investments because they can get their team of people to rehab the property, fill with a tenant, and you sit back and collect your passive rent checks.
In reality, you buy a money pit that eats away at your savings. Clayton has certainly done this to hundreds of not thousands of investors, and the class action lawsuit is only making the lawyers rich.
I personally bought a house from Morris Invest, and had to sell it two years later after I found out that Oceanpointe property managers were feeding my rehab money back to me in the form of 'rent payments' from a non-existant tenant.
My property was trashed, there were squatters, and fines from the city due to public hazards.... I needed up selling the house for over a 10,000 loss, happy to get out from the very actively managed nightmare that was purchased.
There are others that lost much more. If you are looking for a solid investment, stay away from Clayton.
The Moriis Invest website is full of video examples of the representitive quality that investors could expect from the company with their turnkey investment. They promise new roofs, heating and hot water systems, fresh paint and floor finishes and anything necessary to make the house rent-ready, servisable and free from major repairs needs for the next several years. Instead, Morris along with their partner, Oceanpointe Investments, failed to renovate the houses and in 3 of the four units that I purchased, moved individuals into the houses without valid leases. In the one case that I did receive a lease, it was later discoved that a different person was living in the house than the person named on the lease.
A few months after my initial purchase I received violations notices from the city regarding health and safety violations to 3 of the 4 units. Within six months of the initial purchase all rent payments ceased although "tenants" were still living in the units. After numerous unsucessful attempts in contacting Morris and Oceanpointe about removing the non-paying tenants and completing the renovations to the units I was forced to termanate the management agreement and change property managers. In order to bring the units up to rent-ready and decent, safe and sanitary conditions and to evict the non-paying tenants I ended up spending close to $50,000 out of pocket for work that was supposed to have been completed by Morris. Both Morris and Oceanpointe have basically pointed the finger at each other for their failures and criminal activities.
I purchased 8 turn key rental properties from Clayton Morris and Morris Invest. Clayton advertised himself as a turnkey rental provider.
Clayton promised, through personal conversations with me, as well as his podcast, YouTube channel, and website, at least a 12% return, with rental properties in a C class neighborhood, complete rehab including new roof, new pex plumbing, and new mechanicals (furnace, water heater, etc.…).
What I wound up with was properties with no rehab completed, no tenants placed in most cases, D class neighborhoods at best, and nowhere near a 12% return. Now Clayton denies all responsibility, and seems to have moved on to a new market with new unsuspecting clients.