With more foreclosures now than ever before, America’s weak real estate market seems to set new dismal records each month. But smart real estate investors are turning these ‘lemons’ into ‘lemonade’ in an incredibly profitable new way.
The new opportunity is known as ‘Bulk REO Investing’ or ‘REO Package Investing’ and it’s a huge opportunity.
Consider with me, if you will, the fundamentals of the Bulk REO business.
To understand Bulk REO investing is 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 formal process of foreclosure begins at the lender’s discretion. The name for this period is ‘preforeclosure’.
When a defaulted property is placed up for auction, the foreclosure process is completed. Ownership of the property is returned to the lender if the property is not sold at auction. The lender then categorizes the property as ‘Real Estate Owned’ – or ‘REO’ for short.
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. Yet with increasing frequency, REO properties are being sold for pennies or dimes on the dollar. 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.
These REO packages represent the potential to acquire huge amounts of equity for savvy real estate investors. 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 Salvatore Bushemi of Dandrew Partners, a hedge fund in New York.
