Yo Gotti has revealed that despite his passion for real estate, he almost got into forecelosure trouble due to a rookie mistake.
In a clip obtained by Urban Black Wealth, the Memphis rapper said he nearly lost 15 homes — which he purchased at various points throughout his career, most of which were in Memphis — due to not paying his property taxes.
AD LOADING...
“I didn’t even know you had to pay property taxes on a house that you’d paid cash for,” he said.
This mistake — a rookie mistake, and a common one at that — was one the rapper made 20 years ago, when he first got into the real estate game.
Check out the clip below:
Like everyone else who owns a home in the United States, Yo Gotti (real name Mario Mims) has to pay taxes every year on property that he owns. The taxes, which are given to the county of the state in which they live, can either be paid annually, bi-annually, or quarterly.
In the state of Tennessee, failing to pay property taxes can result in the home being foreclosed upon and subsequently sold in what’s known as a tax sale.
AD LOADING...
According to NoLo, a homeowner has 30 days after the tax sale to reclaim their property after it’s sold in a tax sale. Otherwise, the person who purchased the property in the tax sale is the new owner, and has the right to evict the homeowner and all his/her tenants.
Given that Yo Gotti had more than 15 properties that were subjected to foreclosure by tax sale, the consequences could have been devastating.
During a January 2020 interview with Yahoo Finance, Yo Gotti discussed his passion for investing in real estate and fixing up properties.
“Real estate was one of the first things I was doing,” he explained. “I kinda like mistakenly fell into that. I bought a house early in my career, and in my head it was like, ‘If everything goes wrong, I own this one house, you know?’ And luckily, I never needed to move into that house, so it was always getting rented out.
AD LOADING...
“As I started doing concerts and more concerts, I started buying more houses. Like, it got to a thing where I would try to buy a house every month.”
He continued: “I didn’t have education or information about real estate at the time. I learned after I already assumed a few houses, and then I kind of fell in love with the rehabbing of the houses and fixing them up and just the whole process, and turned it into a business.”
