With more foreclosures now than ever before, America’s weak real estate market seems to set new dismal records each month. However, opportunistic real estate investment professionals are turning the recession into great profits with a bit of creativity.
This new opportunity – known as ‘Bulk REO Investing’ – is so huge it’s captured attention from wealthy investors and private investment funds alike.
Let’s take a moment to analyze the basics of this incredibly lucrative business.
To understand investing in Bulk REO, you have to understand the foreclosure process.
When a home owner begins to miss payments on their mortgage, the lender begins to send late/overdue notices to the home owner. The official foreclosure proceedings begin subsequently, as directed by the lender. The ‘pre-foreclosure’ time starts with filing of foreclosure paperwork and concludes at public auction.
Foreclosure is completed when the defaulted property is auctioned. The lender regains ownership of the property if there are no buyers at auction. Such a property is then classified as an ‘REO’ (Real Estate Owned) by the lender.
Typically, lenders list their REO properties with local real estate agents in hopes of selling the property to a retail buyer who will pay full price. However, REO properties are now frequently sold for far less than their ‘book value’. Lenders are willing to do so in exchange for the buyer’s agreement to purchase a ‘package’ of REO’s rather than a single property.
The recession in the United States has yielded huge profits to real estate investors prepared to take advantage. Bulk REO Investors are most successful when they have a well-established source of funding for their REO packages. There are many sources of funding for these transasactions including: hard money and commercial financing, as well as non conventional sources such as hedge funds and private investors. Additionally, one man is becoming very well known in the field of bulk REO investing, and his name is Sal Buscemi of Dandrew Capital Partners, a New-York based hedge fund.
