Continue reading “Making Money Buying Defaulted Junior Liens”

“Short Sales” have become the flavor of choice in recent years, largely through the efforts of gurus who have made a pretty good living encapsulating complex operations into simple sounding slogans. Anyone who has tried to create a Short Sale will attest that there are a lot of moving parts. 

Continue reading “Short Sales or to Discount the Mortgage?”

In the foreclosure business, profit is measured between the amount owed on a property and the net sale proceeds after all expenses. Often, this is confused with "equity". Equity is a lot like sex appeal. The owner may be the only one around who believes he has any! People seem to get a real kick out of constructing personal Net Worth Statements that are based upon some fanciful idea of both high retail market value for their house, and their best guestimate of what will be left after they sell their property. They term this their "equity". Unfortunately, there are huge gaps between this equity and what they'll get after sale in the foreclosure marketplace.

Continue reading “Building Wealth By Controlling Equity and Income”

Whenever you buy from owners in areas with wide spread distress, it's likely that you'll have trouble finding tenants who can pay rents high enough to cover costs. If they'd been plentiful, doesn't if stand to reason that the former owners would have moved out and rented rather than to lose their homes? Beware of buying, where EVERY ONE is being, foreclosed. You'll lose the property too. And be careful about justifying a negative cash flow with a phantom equity that exists only in a larcenous mind. It's more prudent to only buy those properties which have reasonable payments and which are in distress more because of the individual problems of their owner than as a symptom of wide spread economic malaise.

Continue reading “Buying the Right Property for the Right Reasons”

I regularly offer to buy defaulted notes from small loan companies. You know the kind that advertise on TV to consolidate debts or to finance home improvements. These notes can be bought at large discounts because the small lender doesn't want to foreclose and have to make payments on the underlying 1st loans.

Continue reading “Defaulted Note Profits”

For some reason or other, people who buy and sell houses like to call themselves INVESTORS. In many areas they have banded together in "Investment Clubs" that meet regularly. It's difficult to find many people at these meetings who earn six-figure annual incomes. This may be because they don't comprehend that buying and selling houses isn't an investment; it's a business.

Continue reading “Plan Your Work, Then Work Your Plan”

Distress occurs in many ways. Sometimes it is caused by purely financial situations. Other times a spouse gets fed up with real estate and wants to convert everything to cash. In yet others, by the fact that a property has been transferred by will to someone at too great a distance for them to manage it.

Continue reading “Finding Distress Market Opportunities”

Everybody - investors, fixers, landlords, wheeler-dealers, and financiers - who have taken the time to learn the business and to cultivate buying and selling skills can find a profitable niche to work in today's foreclosure market. Before you rush out to make your first million, there are some "don'ts" that you should observe if you want to avoid needless trouble and expense:

Continue reading “Dy-No-Mite Deals for Go-Getters”

I started out buying houses from people who were in default on their mortgages by giving them as little cash as possible, maybe assisting them in finding someplace move, and renting or selling their houses without using much cash at all. That approach didn't work, very well with lenders who had taken back houses in foreclosure, and who now wanted to liquidate them to rebuild cash reserves . . .

Continue reading “Starting Up With Limited Cash and Risk”