“Unfortunately with guardianship, there is such the near-occasion of sin. The temptation is so strong, and there’s no safeguards… that temptation is just so strong and out there,” said Ken Burke, Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller for Pinellas County and the former Head of the Guardianship Improvement Task Force in Florida.The guardianship system is ripe for exploitation by guardians who want to profit off the people they’re supposed to be helping.
A flawed system
Currently in Florida, any adult can become a legal guardian after a background check and 40 hours of training. Continued education is required as well. The fees guardians charge vary, but some guardians bill hundreds of dollars an hour to the ward’s estate, and because the state puts no cap on how many clients a private guardian can have, one guardian can have hundreds of wards. In the most extreme scenario, the guardian can take over all the ward’s communications and assets, potentially leaving the ward with little to no ability to live their own life.Some guardians bill hundreds of dollars an hour to the ward’s estate, and one guardian can have hundreds of wards.
The pitfalls of protection
The price of a ward’s home
The guardian has a fiduciary responsibility to their ward that requires them to obtain the fair value for any possessions the guardian sells. But proving that the guardian violated this fiduciary duty can be difficult, particularly in the volatile housing market. Additionally, the homes of wards can fall into disarray—sometimes due to the ward being unable to upkeep it due to physical or mental illness—and therefore, they can naturally become lucrative ventures for someone interested in flipping. Guardians also cited in their petitions the need for quick money to cover expenses for the ward. There is one safeguard meant to avoid exploitation or unfair sales: judges have to sign off on home sales. However, since the real estate market is in constant turbulence, judges often defer to the guardian’s judgment or a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), done by whoever the guardian chooses — sometimes the real estate agent the guardian is working with to sell the home. Official appraisals aren’t required and aren’t sought in many instances, because some guardians claim that the appraisal would cost too much. Even if an appraisal or CMA is done, it doesn’t necessarily represent the home’s true value. As President and broker of Florida State Realty Group, Stephen McWilliam claims, “What’s the property worth? What somebody will pay for it.”A $230,000 home was flipped for $320,000 less than four months after the guardian sold it. And a $70,000 home was flipped for $240,000 seven months later.
Investigations into an ever-changing market
VICE News found an additional home belonging to a ward that was sold by the same agents. The home was sold to an acquaintance of one of the agents, as shown through a Facebook post showing the agent’s brother and the buyer together at the brother’s bachelor party, renovated by the agent’s brother, and then listed 6 months after for over $220,000 the initial sale price. It sold two months later, at the higher price. Neither agent responded to Vice’s email request for comment.In each of these cases, the property was either not listed publicly for the initial sale or listed as “pending sale” on the day of listing.
The human cost of the holes in the guardianship system are hard to quantify, especially since the database is still in the works. And if Garwood’s case is any example, it is clear that guardianship, if mismanaged or fraudulent, can destroy someone’s life. These days, Garwood shares an apartment with her son Alex and his girlfriend. Her car was sold and many of her possessions were thrown away while she was under guardianship. She had “everything stolen from her,” she says, and now lives on food stamps. Her clothes and furniture come from Goodwill and thrift stores. Her health is shaky—she is currently bedridden, and her son is taking care of her—and she lives in fear of getting placed back into a guardianship and once again being unable to communicate with her friends and family.When Alex came to get her from the facility she’d been locked in for three years, Garwood stood waiting for him by the elevator door. As they hugged, Garwood told him, “I don’t want to let go.”“We have all the time in the world now,” Alex replied.“I’ve never heard not one family member come out and say, ‘guardianship was the best thing that ever happened to my mother, my loved one.’”