There’s Still Money to be Made in Flipping Real Estate

More than a million people bought Pet Rocks as Christmas gifts in 1975. Gary Dahl, of Los Gatos, California, had the idea while joking with friends about his easy-to-care-for pet, a rock. This pet ate nothing and didn’t bark or chew the furniture. Pet Rocks were sold with a funny manual that included tips on how to handle an excited rock and how to teach it tricks. By 1976, Gary Dahl was a millionaire and Pet Rocks were the nation’s favorite pet.

Up until the past 2 years , flipping real estate had become the nation’s new favorite pet.  Easy to take care of and printed money on command.  When anything becomes too EASY– you better believe that trouble is around the corner. 

Be careful out there.  There are still yahoos out there pushing get rich real estate flipping schemes.  Most are now bragging about the millions to be made in foreclosures.  Continue reading “There’s Still Money to be Made in Flipping Real Estate”

Subprime Mortgage Problem Contained? Give Me a Break!

I think that some heads are going to roll when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are forced to admit that the subprime mortgage problem is not contained.  In my previous professional life, I worked as a sales person for a software company.  We as sales people were often referred to as “feet on the street.”  In addition to our sales responsibilities, we were responsible for gathering competitive information, surveying the landscape, detecting trends and most importantly feeding this data back to headquarters.  Through formal as well as informal channels, the “feet on the street” ensured that the executives always had the most current field data. Since the executives were constantly speaking to Wall Street or in Industry forums inaccurate data could be very costly in many ways. Continue reading “Subprime Mortgage Problem Contained? Give Me a Break!”

College Town Real Estate is Still Hot

Real Estate investors should be looking for opportunities within this debacle.  Certain niches are still growing.

Source: Real Estate Journal 

The real-estate slowdown has forced some investors to change tactics. Gone are the days when an investor could buy a single-family home or condo, flip it, and walk away with a sizeable profit just weeks or months later without much effort.  But there’s one niche that continues to show promise for investors undaunted by the slumping housing market: college-town real estate.

This segment has recently caught the attention of large institutional investors like American Campus Communities, a publicly traded real-estate investment trust that earns 95% of its revenues from ownership of off-campus housing, according to Bill Bayless, chief executive officer of the Austin, Texas-based company. He and real-estate experts like Michael H. Zaransky, co-CEO of Prime Property Investors Ltd., a real-estate investment firm in North Brook, Ill., point to rising university enrollments and increasingly limited on-campus housing as two factors that make buying and renting out college-town housing an attractive investment.

While institutional investors like American Campus Communities — which builds large, multiple-unit housing projects for students in campus towns — compete with individual real-estate investors, there is still plenty of room for smaller property owners to profit, Mr. Bayless says.

“I think it is among the top real-estate niches for any real-estate investor to look into,” Mr. Zaransky says.  “It is not tied to general economic performance. It is tied solely to growth and enrollment in schools.”

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We Are Not a Subprime Lender!

On March 15, IndyMac released a rather lengthy press release claiming that it had been inappropriately categorized by many media sources as a subprime lender.   IndyMac stated that it is primarily a prime/Alt-A mortgage lender with minimal exposure to subprime.  With the subprime lenders in melt-down mode, it is quite understandable why IndyMac would want to differentiate itself.  However, in doing so it brought more attention to itself and was featured in an article by CNN Money called “Liar loans: Mortgage Woes Beyond Subprime.”  Sometimes it pays just to be quiet.  

What is Alt-A?

Continue reading “We Are Not a Subprime Lender!”