Alive Investments or Sean Wrench or Jessica Wrench Bought a property from them - promised all remodeled. Multiple city citations a few months after purchase. Guaranteed 20%-30% returns on purchased real estate rentals - bogus. I lost big after purchase & they didn't care. Baltimore Maryland

Facts are stronger than words.  Can post ripoff citations etc. if there's a link here for upload.

My complaint is with Sean Wrench and his real estate company at the time Alive. Now he has gone and created a new one called Thrive. 

I purchased two properties from Sean-Alive both single family residences in Baltimore, Maryland.

1. One was a ready to occupy property (renovation work already completed) which was rented out to a tenant after I purchased it. Tenant paid two months and then stopped paying and needed to be evicted. I don't think they did proper tenant screening because this a similar pattern with complaint above. But this was something I was willing to overlook. 

2. The second property was purchased at full price with renovation costs built into the price (but not yet done). After following up for months and seeing no progress and being told different stories, Sean basically ran and folded his company. I emailed him at is Alive account explaining how I was left holding a property that was just framed up and I had paid full price for it. I explained that I am not going after the holding costs or the crap 1st property purchased, rather only the renovation component which I paid for and didnt get in this property.

He actually responded and apologized mentioning he was himself letdown by his contractors but he would make me whole ("100% promise"). In my follow up email even suggested a payment plan so I know he is earnest and then he stopped responding. I even tried his email at Thrive, and again no email response. Why I had to email him asking for work to be finished as agreed or money returned in the first place makes no sense. On top of that to make promises and then disappear is just wrong.

Unethical business practices. Poor communication.

I have the emails to back up what I am saying Sean so would love to see why yu haven't held up your end of the deal.

Mohammed 

Hi there, my name is Sean. I'm the former owner of Alive. Unfortunately due to some personal changes the company no longer exists. Despite that, this post has bothered me for quite some time. In short it's untrue. But when I consulted an SEO expert I was told to leave it alone. However after having many people ask me about it, I finally have decided to come on and tell my side.

Cynthia Lai is a very nice woman, and frankly I was a bit shocked by her accusations against me. 

Let me address Ms. Lai's accusations one by one.

1. We guaranteed a 20-30% return. We never guaranteed this, however in Baltimore these returns are very common. 

2. We were not licensed. That's correct, we owned the properties we were selling, so the transaction is a for sale by owner.

3. The property was not renovated and rent ready. That is 100% untrue. When Alive sold Ms. Lai the property it was 100% newly renovated and rent ready. I have a bill of sale from the contractor who did the renovations to prove this. Yes Ms. Lai did receive some citations on the property but this is very common for Baltimore City. They were minor citations I believe related to the grass needing to be cut, but none related to the renovation of the property. I also have pictures to show the condition the property was in when it was sold.

4. Double escrow. This is completely irrelevant because this is a common real estate transaction. This was done by a licensed title agency in Baltimore and is a very common and LEGAL transaction. 

5. Property Management without a license. In the state of Maryland a license to manage properties is not required. Property Management companies are not "licensed" in some states this is a requirement but not in Maryland. So again we most certainly did nothing wrong.

The reason Ms. Lai filed this report in my belief is because she was upset about 2 things. It took a few months to find a tenant for the property, and very unfortunatley the tenant turned out to be horrible, none of this our fault. The other reason was because Ms. Lai was upset because the heat stopped working in the property. When we sold the property the heat worked fine, and we had an inspection done on the property, and the inspection shows such. Because Ms. Lai was so upset, I agree to pay to have the heat fixed. This was not something we were required to do but I did it in an attempt to make her happy, which sadly it did not. 

Ms. Lai was a very nice woman, but unfortunately proved very difficult to work with. We worked very hard to try and make her happy but unfortunately nothing seemed to make her happy. Eventually she ended up moving her "Property Management" to a company in Georgetown which is in DC. In my opinion this was not a good decision because this company was very inexperienced in dealing with properties in Baltimore City so it very likely only made Ms. Lai's problems even worse. 

I have worked with hundreds of investors over the years, and unfortunately you cannot make everyone happy. I am deeply sorry for Ms. Lai's problems, but I assure you that we worked very hard to fix them. Once Ms. Lai fired us as her property management company the situation was out of my hands. 

For anyone reading this, I have MANY references of very happy investors and if this post is not eventually removed I will consider asking them to comment as well because it's very difficult to see my name being "trashed" in this way.