Don’t do business with Freedom Hawk Equity! – Part III

Read part I here
Read part II here

I started looking for reviews of Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC online. I was surprised to find ones that were negative and calling out Edward Mendez by name!

I found they have an “F” rating on the Better Business Bureau website. We should have done this before we signed the contract, but we trusted they were going to do right by us instead of trying to pull a fast one.

Their website was up and down at various times while we were tying to contact them. It is currently “suspended” as I write this.

Somewhere along the way, Blake Hawkins put an addendum on our deed saying that Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC were going to get paid no matter who sold the house or when it sold. Basically, they drove down the value of our house and made it so we couldn’t sell it.

Getting into the legal stuff

I’m putting this information out there in hopes that it might help someone else avoid the problems we encountered when dealing with Freedom Hawk Equity, or dealing with real estate problems in general. I don’t have a large audience at this point so I don’t know how much help it will be, but I figure it needs to be put out there.

Further caveats – I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. All of what I’m posting is from my side of the story. I’m sure Blake Hawkins, who runs Freedom Hawk Equity, has his side. To the best of my knowledge what I’m putting out here is true and accurate. I’m not committing libel (a published false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation; a written defamation) because these are the facts I can verify. If I were to publish something like “Blake Hawkins kicks puppies!” that would be libel, because I don’t know it is true nor could I prove it. I could call him an asshat all day long if I want because that is my opinion thus not libel.

I got in touch with a lawyer from my business networking groups that I’d worked with before. I asked him to look over the contract for us. He did so and said it was a bad contract that did nothing to help or protect us and everything to protect Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC. He said we needed to move carefully so we didn’t end up in a lawsuit. Ultimately he said that he could write up and submit a revocation of the Attorney-In-Fact privileges in the contract the wife signed to the public record. We waited to hear back but didn’t get any responses for a few weeks. He wrote it and sent it to us. Ultimately he never submitted the document to the public record and nothing happened. Very disappointing.

In the meantime we got a call from someone who bought our house from Mr. Hawkins, but I guess the deal didn’t work out because the buyer called us to get his earnest money back. We explained that we weren’t selling our house through Freedom Hawk Equity and that Mr. Hawkins didn’t have the right to sell our house. I don’t know if the guy ever got his earnest money back or not.

We found another lawyer who specialized in real estate law. He looked over the contract and said that Freedom Hawk Equity didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. As things progressed, he filed a lawsuit against Freedom Hawk Equity for committing fraud. Recently the lawyer called us to tell us that Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC settled the lawsuit, has removed the addendum from our deed, and now we are able to sell the house.

This could have been a smooth transaction but Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC made it a horrible experience. We should have had the house sold by now. We’ve had people interested in it but we couldn’t do anything until this matter was resolved. It added a lot of stress on us, which especially wasn’t good for my wife while she was in the hospital for several months.

I reiterate my basic thesis of this series – don’t do business with Freedom Hawk Equity, LLC.

And one more thing.

Blake Hawkins is an asshat.

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