What are the chances of buying a decent house at the court house steps? Last July, these two youtube videos captured a group of houses on the foreclosure list, and was marked as the 'Trustee Sale Test Group', so we could follow up later to see how they did. The first...
Year: 2010
Shadow Liquidation
From SFGate: Want a read on the housing market's future? Ask a vulture investor. So-called vultures - also known as distressed-asset investors - make money by buying distressed assets, such as soured mortgage loans, and predicting which way the wind will blow to...
Even Score
More from the foreclosure tour - see youtube tour below. It is harder to find the smoking deals when looking mid-range, and investor action has been heavy. In the last 30 days there have been 28 successful trustee sales of SFRs in Carlsbad and Encinitas, with 14...
Can’t Give It Away?
The last clip on this tour of recent foreclosure contestants shows the biggest giveaway we've seen - to set the opening bid WaMu cut $1.4 million off the amount owed, and it still went back to bene!
Home Buying Tips, 2010
It was asked yesterday how to go about finding deals like the ones LGS has purchased. The search is agonizing because you'e looking at all the leftovers that have been picked over by everyone else. The good ones go quick, and it's tough to keep your chops up. Some...
Real Estate Investing, 2010
Real estate investors, like baseball players, are inclined to try for the home run. Yet hitting singles and doubles can be more effective - ask Tony Gwynn. Yesterday we wrapped up a 12-month-long escrow! It was a short sale of a one-bedroom condo in La Mesa for...
John Wooden R.I.P.
SD Sales Survey
Remarks from page 42 of the C-S May Survey of real estate agents (mostly new-home sales): Traffic fails to meet expectations. Buyer traffic came in short of agents’ expectations in May, as our traffic index fell to 20 from 52 in April, short of a neutral reading of...
Buy Vs. Rent
From the WSJ/Trulia: "Why on Earth would you buy down here when you can rent?" asked a friend of mine in Miami Beach not long ago. "Buying is so over." He promptly moved to Manhattan for work reasons–and bought a $1 million loft on the Upper West Side. Note the...
CV Comps
This youtube video tour of recent sales around 92130 starts with two detached 2,408sf condos in PHR that closed in the $600,000s. In the peak era (2005-2007) when these were new, there were 24 of them that sold over $800,000. Yes, these two could be called outliers...