The weakness of the U.S. economy has given rise to the largest epidemic of foreclosures in American history. Yet well-funded investors in real estate are seizing upon this opening to profit from an profoundly profitable new opportunity.
That opportunity is called Bulk REO Investing, and the opportunity is huge.
Consider with me, if you will, the fundamentals of the Bulk REO 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 lender directs the subsequent timing of the actual foreclosure proceedings. ‘Pre foreclosure’ is the name given to the time between implementation of the foreclosure proceedings and the public auction.
The defaulted property is ultimately auctioned, thus completing the foreclosure process. If there are no buyers for the property at auction, the property is returned to the lender. The designation of ‘REO’ (Real Estate Owned) is then attached to the foreclosed property.
Lenders have no interest in owning property, and thus usually opt to list their REO properties with a local real estate broker in hopes of a retail sale. But more and more, lenders are selling their REO properties for a greatly reduced price. The trade-off is that the buyer must purchase multiple REO properties in each transaction.
Qualified real estate investors are increasingly finding once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in these REO packages. The most successful Bulk REO Investors will have a well-respected source of funding for their transactions. Some sources of funding for these transactions are: personal funds, hard money lenders, commercial lenders and non-conventional sources such as private investors and hedge funds. Additionally, one man is becoming very well known in the field of bulk REO investing, and his name is Salvatore Buscemi of Dandrew Capital Partners, a New-York based hedge fund.
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