Pretty strong I know. But I do. I hate ’em. Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the real estate business. I LOVE looking at houses. I LOVE buying houses. And I LOVE renting houses. I just HATE foreclosure. I must confess that I’ve become spoiled. I realized that in spades this weekend. You see, since about August I have shifted my focus to looking at regular listings. No foreclosures. No HUD homes. None of…
Category: Real Estate
Vultures Are Circling Over Distressed Properties
This was a headline in Saturday’s Washington Post. Like the New York Times, you can always count on the ol’ Post to get things exactly 180 degrees wrong. Vultures? Really?? I don’t know about you, but that description sounds pretty bad. Even a bit sinister. Maybe a touch evil. They like to make ma and pa out to be victims of the big bad mortgage companies, and they make it sound like those of us…
The Foreclosure Concierge
I started a new line of business last week. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I’m a big proponent of buying single family homes and holding them as long-term rentals. It’s my belief that it’s an ideal way to build real wealth. The idea had been jelling in my mind for a couple of weeks, and everything finally clicked into place after a meeting that I attended. Even though I absolutely despise…
Get Ready for the Tidal Wave . . . .
I received an interesting call yesterday. Turns out the caller, who’s part of a fairly large and well known real estate company (at least around the Detroit News classified ads), had just picked up a block of 100 foreclosures directly from a lender without going through a realtor. Big deal you say. Happens all the time. Maybe, but that wasn’t the noteworthy part of our conversation. He went on to tell me that this was…
A Tale of Two Painters
I am perplexed. If you read the paper you can tell how bad the housing market is here. With that comes the decline in home improvement which hits the trades people hard. Very hard. I know of at least three crews that I had bid jobs over the winter that are no longer in the business. It’s gotten so bad that the high end contractor that I always use on my personal residence asked me…
My Buy-and-Hold Performance Metric – Cost per Equity Dollar
If you’re even a semi-regular reader of this blog, then you already know that I’m a huge fan of buying and holding properties as rentals, because it can yield and infinite ROI (See the post on NOOP). In a nutshell, NOOP demonstrated a repeatable process where you buy a property for cash (business credit, private investor, hard money, etc), rehab it as necessary, then pull all of your purchase, rehab, and holding costs out when…