Lien Sale Paperwork: Fill & Download for Free

This is a little twist on the question but it is still a good story. I used to have a business located in a not too nice area in Oakland. One night burglars broke into the yard, stole a bunch of our product and used my car trailer to haul off their Ioot. Naturally I filed a police report with the Oakland police department.Fast forward about five years, I get a call from the California Highway Patrol. They have recovered my trailer and it is available to be picked up at a local tow yard. Of course I had to pay towing fees, etc. The surprise is that when I pick up my trailer, it now has custom wheels, brakes and a fancy paint job, none of which it had before.I had to go to the local CHP office to sign some paperwork and they told me that an officer had pulled over a guy towing my trailer because of a burnt out tail light. They ran the VIN and it came back as stolen. He had actually bought the trailer fair and square at a lien sale at a towing company. The towing company had recovered my trailer somewhere for illegal parking. However they never ran the VIN on it to see if it was stolen. So the poor guy got arrested in front of his kids for a stolen trailer. I felt real bad for the guy and told him he should sue the towing company for negligence and what they put him through.Anyhow, I got my trailer back in much better condition then when it got stolen.

I did this once in California, it’s long, tedious and any time you get something even slightly wrong you get to start again (more about that in a minute)the process in California is what is known as a Lien Sale. Since you have the car, park it in your garage. Then start charging the owner storage. After 30–60 days of accumulated storage you can get going.The first thing you do is fill out paperwork to the DMV that says “I have this unpaid bill for storage on this car but I don’t know who owns it, can you tell me the owners’ name and address”What will come back is the “registered owners” and the “legal owners” names. You then send them bills for the storage. They’re probably not going to even respond, you might not even have the right address and the letters will come back to you. But keep all of that paperwork, it’s important.After you get that back, you send them a notice of lien sale (to all interested parties) Of course some of those are going to come back. Registered mail, return receipt of course.After this you conduct a Lien Sale, you post (on the front window of your house) a piece of paper that says you are selling the car for the amount of your lien, the cost of storage. You will likely get no bidders. Since you get no bidders you then get to file to get the car titled in your name. Once that happens you can register the car and drive it or sell it.Now be careful, the DMV are real sticklers for details. There are time limits to the postings, time limits the filings, etc. Heed them, or you are going to start over. (I did mine three times before I was successful)the most absurd example was that the “legal owner” of the car was a local small time used car seller. I knew them. But they had moved since the previous owner bought the car. When I sent out the letters announcing the lien sale to all interested people I sent it to their updated address, not the address that the DMV had. Oh, no. Not good. DMV voided all of the paperwork and I started over. Now mind you when I sent the registered letter the the address on file, it came back as undeliverable. Oh well

I struck a deal with a local tow yard, offering to buy 2 or 3 pre-Lien Sale auction cars a week, to help clear their cramped lot. The night before the auction - the owner sold me cars of my choice for about $250–1200 each. My investment in reconditioning was no more than $1500/week. In most cases, the cars sold clearly through word-of-mouth, or sat in designated, public “For Sale lots.” Whatever couldn’t sell I was able to flip, through Craigslist, LetGo and OfferUp.Because they were sold with Lien paperwork - all I did was take the cash and hand them the keys, car and paperwork, and let the buyer handle all title transfers at the DMV. I never took legal ownership, as I only intended to be the “temporary middleman,” tasked with finding new owners. Test drives entailed only a one block radius, as the cars were not insured and were less than $2500. Yes, the buyers were not the most upstanding people you could find, but there was no paper trail leading back to me whatsoever.It was a lot of work - but I had many, $10,000 profit months.