We’ve seen and heard about flippers paying more and more (too much!) in the competitive trustee-sale environment at the court house steps. With the backlog of occupants not vacating the foreclosed properties, there is bound to be some overlap.
The 3,278sf house in this video went back-to-bene in December, but only recently vacated. A few doors up, a flipper paid $810,000 on April 28th for a slightly bigger model on the same side of the street, but there you have to look through the trees to see the golf course.
Lo and behold, both hit the MLS within three days of each other, both priced at $899,000 - and the race to get out first, was on! This one was marked pending today:
I don’t want to beat a dead horse – we know that realtors are committing fraud and deceit. Here’s an example of one guy, the previous listing agent of this house, who has been inputting short-sale listings onto the MLS for the last 1+ years, with the vast majority (over 75% of them) marked pending or contingent immediately.
If your clients are getting what they want, then maybe you can sleep at night. But when just as many of a broker’s listings are being foreclosed on, as are selling, there’s a problem:
This is the second half of the ‘luz tour, covering the western side.
At the end of the video there is mention of a flipper who just paid $1,430,500 at the trustee sale on January 13th, and then closed escrow with the new buyer on February 26th for $2,175,000 cash. If you’d like to see photos of it, click here:
We already know that flippers are flooding the streets in search of profits, so it’s inevitable that we’ll see them competing…..with each other! Don’t be surprised if we see surges of new listings, especially around recent high sales – here’s a youtube video:
Tom Tarrant is a San Diegan who moved to San Antonio to remodel and sell historic houses while waiting out the California Real Estate Collapse. He has a great blog with videos about the details of home remodeling, selling flippers, and snippets about Texas!
I asked Tom about featuring him here, and how it all came together. He responded, “There were alot of California investors flipping and parking cash here in rentals in 2007-2008. I think Bruce Norris was writing about moving your money to Texas around that time. The local realtors had a hayday selling multiple properties to them so it was a mini bubble in its own way. Now its slowed down a bit, but all in all SA’s managed to escape most of the national housing mess. Most of the California investors are now gone or it seems cashing out to move their money back but thats o.k. with us as there is less competition on the fixer uppers.”
A link to his blog (scroll down to the beginning):
The Hat Trick House is finally done and officially on the market and in MLS. We’ve had a swarm of buyers throughout the rehab and 3 great offers before it was even finished. We went 9% over budget but luckily our estimated sales price is surprisingly up 25% due to market conditions! Our list price is $359,000, this will be the highest sale in our area and set a new high comp if it sells for that price. My wife and I staged the house and it’s all ready for an advertised open house this Saturday. We already had one showing today, one scheduled for tomorrow morning and an agent that sold another one of our properties (The Abandonded House) just called and her “picky” client found it today on Realtor.com and wants to see it. The agent from our first showing today said the master bedroom closet alone would sell the house. Really?
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Four years after the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, flipping homes is back in fashion.
Jon Mirmelli, a Phoenix real-estate investor, learned late in the morning of Sept. 28 that a never-occupied custom house on the northern fringes of this Phoenix suburb was going up for auction around noon the same day. The six-bedroom home, built on a three-acre desert plot, has a kitchen with two dishwashers, four ovens, “antibacterial” copper sinks, and a master “spa” bathroom with space for a flat-screen TV visible from the tub.
The minimum bid, as set by a unit of Citigroup Inc., which had a $1.3 million mortgage on the home, was $379,900. After several minutes of bidding among investors and their representatives, some wearing shorts and flip-flops, Mr. Mirmelli won the home for $486,300. A week later, he agreed to sell it for $690,000 to a woman who moved in this month.
During the housing boom, millions of Americans tried to make money by buying and then quickly reselling new houses and condominiums. That kind of flipping stopped several years ago as home sales stalled amid a surge in foreclosures and curtailed lending.
Now, a different breed of flipper is proliferating: one who seeks bargains at foreclosure auctions. Unlike the boom-time flippers, the latest generation needs cold cash, lots of local-market knowledge and strong nerves.
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The Hat Trick House
