I called a real estate attorney named David Feldman. He’d helped one of my clients buy a commercial building in Yonkers the year before, and I trusted him. He was in his fifties, calm and careful, with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He never raised his voice, and he read every page of everything.
I sat in his office in White Plains with my hand on my pregnant belly and told him what I wanted to do.
“You want to buy your parents’ house out of foreclosure,” he said slowly. “Without them knowing it’s you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I thought about it. “Because if they lose that house, they lose everything they think they are. And because my son is going to be born in two months, and I want him to have Thanksgivings at his grandparents’ house. Like I did.”
David looked at me for a long time over his glasses.
“Nicole, I’ll help you. But you need to understand something. A house costs a lot more than the purchase price. There’s the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, repairs. Property taxes in Westchester are some of the highest in the country. You’ll be carrying this house for years.”
“I understand.”
“And if your parents ever find out, they may not be grateful. People with a lot of pride sometimes hate the person who saved them.”
“I understand that too.”
He set up a limited liability company for me. We called it Hollis Lane Holdings LLC, after the street where my grandmother had lived. The LLC was registered in New York, and I was its only member. My name didn’t appear on the public deed. Only the company’s did.
The bank had taken the house back at the foreclosure auction and was ready to sell it. Through David, Hollis Lane Holdings made an offer of $585,000. The bank accepted. I put down $150,000, most of my savings, and financed the rest with a commercial mortgage from a local bank, $435,000 at a fixed rate.
