How can you really capitalize on bank owned properties? It all depends on the speed with which you can locate deals, make quick proper offers and find buyers for those deals.

It can happen that on a single property many offers arrive at the same time offering even more than the bank originally asked for. So you need to be flexible and fast in locating your deals and ready also to move outside of your backyard if needed.

You have to weed through many bad deals, that’s true and you need to have a system that allows you not only to find good opportunities but also to fund them and then to market them as fast as you can.

Five ways to find properties and their pros and cons:

1. You can consult the MLS if you are also a Realtor or with the help of a friendly Realtor who can make daily extracts of what comes up in a specific area. This is fairly effective if you are dealing in a limited zone and if you have somebody who can do the work for you. The list tell you the up to date situation of the property (listed, under contract, sold) and you have most of the information you need about the house, including picture. Sometimes the Realtor can use an automatic system to send you daily e-mails so you are kept regularly updated. The problem here is that you are limited to one area and you cannot tell which is a good deal from a bad deal upfront. You need to do research on every property and it can be time consuming.

   

2. You can go on the many free sites maintained by different banks. The advantage here is to span the whole nation, but the disadvantage is that you need to check every single deal (no selection is made upfront) and you need to look up many different sites: both for covering the different banks and for collecting all the information you need about a property, including pictures.

3. You can purchase a “ready made lists” of foreclosure or bank owned properties. Here you often have some kind of value associated to the property so that you can make a general selection upfront and you can operate in many different markets. These sites sometimes also provide basic information about each property. The drawback is that these lists sometimes are not updated and therefore you waste time on properties that are already under contract or have been sold already. And you need to pay for the list.

4. You an use a software that pulls data from the MLS and let’s you make offers in an automatic fashion. MLS Gorilla is one of these software, for example. The drawback is that these software have often an high price tag attached to them, they get locked in specific areas if one of your competitors decides he wants to have exclusive access and you need to take a shotgun approach by making low offers on everything, which can lead in getting acceptances on junk properties that you then need to discard and missing the houses that are in better shape and where you could afford to make higher offers and still get a nice return.

5. You can finally subscribe to a search engine specifically designed to locate bank owned properties. In this can you can access directly the bank database without relying on MLS and any error that could be in it, you can access the private databases of major wholesalers and you can make a search for properties with a defined discount ranges, while also getting all the other properties in the area in a separate list from which you can pick and chose freely. The only system I know that is capable of doing this right now is REO Goldminer (http://budurl.com/reog) which I have been using now for 3 months and that has kept improving the quality of their leads.
   

   You can still get properties that are already under contract sometimes because it takes a while for the bank to update its own database, but you can span the whole US and pick and choose only those area where REO’s ARE available. Additionally they are providing an outstanding training support for using the system and marketing deals and they have also developed a community for wholesale exchanges. The main drwaback is that the system is not available to everybody: you have a limited number of subscribers that are allowed on it.

Pick and choose the system that fits you best and have success with it.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. REO Goldminer is reopening its gates for a few days starting today at noon. Last time they sold 500 memberships in 2 days or so. This second and last offer will stay open until Friday June 5^th and then it’s gone! http://budurl.com/reog.

Did you know that the US population grows at the rate of 3 million a year. It is just a whole city as big as Rome was coming out of nowhere every single year and spring in full growth just right before our eyes, with it’s fresh new population needing food, work, entertainment and sheltering. Look around, do you still see families of 5 or 8 people living all in the same home? No, everybody wants his own place to live, his own area of freedom and privacy, a place that he or she can tailor to her life and needs and that can call home.

Nowhere in Europe we same a comparable growth and how comes therefore that the real estate market in the US is suffering while European houses still maintain pretty much their value? In areas that have been hit hard by the downfall, like California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, prices have come down as much as 50% and keep drifting down. Is there going to be an end?

When we look at the real market we see that transactions are still occurring, spurred by the incredible prices available for bank owned properties. Investors are still doing business, maybe using foreign money to fund the deals, but they are more selective and professional.

Those who know how to go about it get rewarded the opportunities that this market also offers. They estimate that in the US alone there is $ 9 trillion on the side line ready to surface in the form of pent up housing demand. You need to be able to stay in the market and profit from it while the new uptrend will spring. How do you do it? Well, by knowing your staff and learning it from people who have been successful in real life and still are doing what they teach (which is unfortunately not so common).

You need fresh ideas and fresh way to approach old issues. I found some very good ones in the book : “Be a real estate heavyweight” by Dan Auito, a friend of mine who has a passion for teaching and has been investing in real estate himself for over three decades. Dan has now put together an impressive volume of 1479 pages! You find it on a CD and it contains the tips and strategies of the most successful real estate investors in the US. Each one has written his section of the book so it is like having many volumes condensed into a single huge reference guide.

You have everything you might ever need for the next 12 months of adventure in the real estate field. There is no better time than today to master these skills and test your abilities in a field that has never presented so many problems and opportunities combined together in a single time.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. I strongly advise that you get a copy of this book and ready it. It is very affordable and if you are at all serious about dealing in real estate you cannot skimp on your education. This is the opportunity of being taught directly, in their own words, by 96 experts! http://budurl.com/auit