Re: Foreclosures - Posted by Utah Investor
Posted by Utah Investor on February 12, 2002 at 10:11:12:
Steve,
You got some great advice from Rich.
Please don’t buy a list.
As I tell most people I’ve Mentored:
You don’t need no stinkin’ list!
They are old, sold to all of your competitors, and very expensive.
You will create your own list as Rich has said.
Here’s what I do?
Doing research is #1. Have you bought any books/courses? Don’t jump in without knowing what you are doing. You can make great money doing this, but you can get burned if you don’t have the knowledge to do-it right.
I say to young beginners, I tell them to go to the library and get every foreclosure book you can find, check them out & read them all, next, go to Barnes & Noble and read theirs, or buy the good ones and read them. Get some knowledge. Next go the Foreclosure Trustee Sales and watch, listen, ask & learn, learn, learn. Eventually you will want a Guru to help you, but they ain’t cheap.
OK, Thanks for the advice. I?ve completed most of what you said. What is next?
I’d focus on going to the County Recorder’s Office and just get to know the place. Look up information on your house, your friend?s homes & your neighbors. Just start looking up houses, get all the information you can. Feel comfortable with everything there at the recorder’s office and how to look up all the information about any house. They’ll have computers you can use, microfilm machines, big map books. Go play, look, dig, ask questions, watch other people, listen to their questions, watch how they got their answer. Look for a bulletin board for foreclosure (Trustee Sales) postings.
Go to the Courthouse. Look for a Sheriff’s bulletin board for Sheriff’s Sales. Look for public access to computers to look up cases. Look up your family & friends, see if any of them have traffic tickets, see if they’ve been sued or sued others or have judgments. Get familiar with how to look stuff up.
Look in the papers for Foreclosure (Trustee Sales) postings, should be small print in the legal section just before the classifieds. Find some foreclosures. When are the sales? Go to some foreclosure sales. Just jump right in to this whole process and ask, read, learn and just be aware of what’s going on.
As you go do all this, don’t get frustrated if you can’t look something up, if no one will talk to you at the foreclosure sales, if the clerk at the court or recorder’s office won’t help you, it’s OK. Just experience this whole process, learn what you can, and you’ll have some good stories to share with me, & some great questions to ask when I get there.
Do I do fixer-uppers?
As far as fix-up goes, I don’t believe in it. I use to do it, but not anymore.
Simply put, the greatest market to sell to is the “fixer-upper” market. Fixing it myself requires me to now sell for full price, and then comes the question, Why buy my fixed-up, full price house?
I sell it as a fixer, I leave money on the table for the next guy, and I’ve sold houses in less than 45 min. and many in less than a day or two. I usually sell my houses in less than a week and close within 30 days. I have ways to sell quickly.
I’ve been meaning to share another point about picking up distressed properties.
First I’d like to state that I believe we are all mostly working on distressed properties. By that I mean, we are striving to pickup a property for pennies on the dollar, and either flip it or rent it for a positive cash flow. Either way, we are all looking for a good deal. 90% of good deals are distressed properties. It might be a divorce, relocation, bank repo, foreclosure, job loss, etc…
The 2nd point is that you don’t have to have good credit, nor get a loan from a bank. You can work a situation out with the homeowner without getting a new loan. There are many ways to structure it.
Many great people on this forum will give you great advice, mine is that all the deals I’ve done in the past 3 years, I’ve never got a new loan, I always worked it out with the homeowner. You can do a L/O, or do a wrap with them, or just make their payments in their behalf (the bank doesn’t know and doesn’t mostly care either). Next is just sell the place, make your lump sums of cash, and move on to the next deal.
Make Sense?
How do you evaluate a deal and do it in less than 10 minutes?
I search a property through either the County Court House or Recorder’s Office (aka Recorder of Deeds - depending on the State you live in), and evaluate whether it’s a good deal or bad one. I get over the internet:
Year built
Square feet
County Assessor Market Value
Acreage
Existing loans
from this information, I not only know if it’s a good deal or not, I can describe what the house will look like in my area.
I mostly use the County Tax Assessor (Appraiser in some States) Market value & existing loans on the property. From those 2 items, I can decide if it’s a good deal or not.
I want a property where the 1st mortgage is 75% or less of what the property is worth in a “as-is” value, or where there are two mortgages and the 1st mortgage is less than 70% or less of what the property is worth (I don’t care how big the 2nd mortgage is because I’m going to buy it for 10 cents on the dollar or foreclose it off & pay nothing.
I hope you understand this.
Picking-up Preforeclosures: Do you mail flyers, call them, or knock on their door?
I do all three. I mail fliers immediatly. I look them up in the phone book (only about 1/2 will have numbers) and I call the ones I can. Then I drive by those I didn’t talk to and knock on their door between 5 - 8 p.m. during the week, and on Saturdays. Those 3 ways always bring me more deals than I can handle.
These are the basic steps, there is much more. But hopefully now your eyes have been opened to the possibilities.
Are you sorry you asked? 
Follow these ways, & you will get what you want in Real Estate, and in life.
Best Regards,
utahinvestor@yahoo.com