Tired of negotiating with banks which don’t want to drop prices? Too much time spent on due diligence and offers as compared to actual acceptances? Too many competitors offering against you? There is hope!

The new big thing about bank owned properties is buying from a list of heavily discounted houses. They call it portfolio buying and it is the new wave of wholesaling on a big scale. As the name implies, you need to buy several houses at a time in order to enter the world of “portfolios”. Sometimes you can share the buying with other investors so that you don’t need to buy the whole list yourself, but be prepared to pay much more because there will be an intermediary or more than one between you and the bank in order to make it possible for a package to be split.

It can be very advantageous to buy from lists because you can get bigger discounts that you would get dealing with the bank through a Realtor on a listed property. The problem here is that these list get pushed around so much that you sometimes get to prices that are even higher than the listed properties.

I was talking with a big old time wholesaler here in Florida and he told me a very funny story: somebody had got to him with a very “hot” list of bank owned properties. He checked them up and found out that each of them was actually listed on the MLS for an asking price that was lower than what was asked on the list.

Additionally most of these list often contain properties that are in horrible shape and can’t be salvaged. They call them lemons. So the real gold can be found by combining lists you might get from some wholesaler and standard research on listed REO (Real Estate Owned).

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S.

I have mentioned it already, but I have used for 2 months a very new search engine that looks for bank owned properties nation wide. It’s very fast and is being adopted by several real estate gurus, you should check it out, it can save you time in the research. Here is my affiliate link http://www.reogoldminer.com

Recently I have been exposed to one of the most interesting experiments that I believe were ever conducted in the world of real estate. A whole crew of investors sailed off aboard a cruise ship to the Bahamas in order to demonstrate that you can invest in bank owned properties from a distance and that you can do it while learning how to do it at a professional level. The project has been conducted by Mark Jackson and Sam Bell with some of their best students.

Here you can see the interview I did for my investors in Italy with Rick Dove who has been the winning investor in the team and who tells us his experience just after having disembarked from the ship. He comments on how much concerned and involved Mark and Sam have been involved with their students, showing not only competence but also personal interest and care for the student’s success.

Dove is looking for partners in the Atlanta area where he sees very hot opportunities right now.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. In the next few days we will meet all the students that were on board of the ship who will tell us their experience and what they got from it.