Latonya McGee thought she’d found a way into homeownership for $760 a month. Instead, she signed a contract that has left her owing $89,000 on a north St. Louis house a city appraiser valued at just $5,249, according to First Alert 4’s investigation into a real estate practice known as the “slow flip.”
McGee put down a $2,500 deposit and moved in earlier this year, expecting the kind of rent-to-own path that’s been pitched to buyers who can’t qualify for a traditional mortgage. What she found instead, per First Alert 4’s reporting, was a house with fire damage in the basement, raw sewage backing up, active gas leaks, and a water heater that didn’t work. Repair estimates ran into the tens of thousands of dollars, on top of a purchase price of $89,000 financed at 10% interest over 30 years. She ultimately walked away from the deal rather than sink more money into a property worth a tiny fraction of what she owed on it.
A Business Model Built on Contracts, Not Mortgages
The seller, Ann Star Homes, uses what’s called a contract-for-deed arrangement: the buyer moves in and makes payments like a mortgage, but the company keeps the actual title until the full balance is paid off. If a buyer misses payments or walks away, as McGee did, they typically lose everything they’ve already paid in, and the company keeps the house to sell to the next buyer. Attorney Rob Swearingen of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, who is representing McGee, has taken the case to court, arguing the contracts violate both St. Louis occupancy ordinances and state and federal consumer protection law.
McGee’s case isn’t isolated, and it isn’t even limited to Ann Star Homes. In Virginia Beach, a woman named Ashley Barton lived in similarly unsafe conditions in a property tied to Joey Chianese, also reported by First Alert 4, under the same kind of contract-for-deed structure. Chianese is also a co-founder of Bustling Funding, a separate Missouri LLC the City of St. Louis has since sued directly, alleging in its own filing that the company’s arrangement amounts to “a trap for unwary buyers,” according to St. Louis Magazine’s coverage of the litigation. City records show the company held 48 parcels as of 2025, concentrated in north St. Louis, the same part of the city where McGee’s house sits.
The Math That Makes It Work for Sellers
The gap between what McGee owes and what the city says her house is actually worth is the whole story in two numbers. An $89,000 sale price against a $5,249 appraisal isn’t a rounding error or a disagreement about market conditions, it’s roughly seventeen times the assessed value. That kind of spread only works as a business model if the seller expects a meaningful share of buyers to eventually default, at which point the house reverts back to the company and gets resold to the next buyer under a fresh contract, with a fresh down payment collected all over again. A promoter of the broader “slow flip” model, Scott Jelinek, has built a following of more than 17,000 subscribers teaching the approach and has claimed a 75 to 80 percent buyer success rate, though that figure hasn’t been independently verified by any court filing or city record reviewed in this reporting.
What Buyers Can Actually Check Before Signing
The practical warning sign in both the McGee and Barton cases is the same: a contract-for-deed sale that skips a standard home inspection and an independent appraisal is a contract where the buyer has no real way of knowing what they’re actually agreeing to pay for. A traditional mortgage lender requires an appraisal precisely because it protects against exactly this scenario, a sale price wildly detached from a property’s real condition and value. When that safeguard isn’t part of the deal, the burden shifts entirely onto the buyer to verify the numbers themselves, and for buyers already stretched thin trying to find an affordable path to ownership, that step is often the one that gets skipped.
The city of St. Louis, for its part, isn’t just watching. Beyond the Bustling Funding lawsuit, officials have signaled they want these companies out of the market entirely rather than simply fined into compliance. Whether that legal pressure changes the underlying economics of the slow-flip model, or just pushes it to another city, is still playing out in court.
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