Where'd Everybody Go?

So 2011 is around the corner. It's been almost 7 years since I started this blog and investing in real estate. Back in the first couple of years of this blog, the real estate bubble had yet to burst and people everywhere were getting into flipping properties. There were a regular group of people that used to blog on their own and leave comments on this blog. I got to thinking about what happened to those people and what they might be doing today....

Loan Closing And Apartment Financials Improving

The property behind hard money #14 has been sold and is supposed to close escrow this week. If it does, this will have been a 6 month loan, which is pretty good. (The mortgage note was for a one year term.) The property was rehabbed in two months and was on the market for four months.Things are turning around slowly at the Houston apartment complex too. Occupancy for November was 90% and we saw a decline of about $3,000 in rent concessions as well....

Man Stands On Principles, Dares Bank To Foreclose, And Wins

I wrote last month about a guy who was willing to let his bank foreclosure on his house over $25 in fees the bank erroneously charged him and refused to reverse. Turns out the bank blinked and has agreed to the man's (entirely reasonable) demands and has canceled the foreclosure four days before the auction. Nice to see someone at the bank has some common sen...

House Now On The Market

Last time, I mentioned the property behind hard money loan #15 was about two weeks away from going on the market. I'm pleased to say it is now on the market! Below are some photos.This is a bit interesting. The house isn't fully staged, just a few pieces of artwork on the walls and some plants. But I still think it makes the property show better than being completely empty.The property is listed for...

Rolling Along

Nothing much new has been happening on the investment property front. My hard money loans are being paid on time. Operations at the Houston apartment complex were essentially unchanged for September (the last month I have data for) from August. As I mentioned after the last investor conference call, the property is currently losing money, but things are slowly turning around. Management expects a return to profitability in early 2011 and a resumption...

Now this takes some guts (or lack of brains)

This guy is letting his house go into foreclosure because his bank erroneously charged him a $25 fee and refused to refund it. If he can buy his house back at auction for less than what he owes, he'll come out ahead.Not sure if he fully understands what he's doing though. He seems to think that at the foreclosure, it will automatically become owned by the bank and then he can buy it back as a REO property. Does he not realize that when it is at auction,...

eBook Price Reduction!

I've lowered the price of my eBook, A Flipper's Diary! The original price was $29.98. Get it now for only $12.95 - that's a savings over over 55%!...

GMAC Finance Halting Foreclosures **Updated*

If you are a foreclosure investor, you might want to start paying attention to what company is doing the foreclosure on any property you are interested in. We've all seen the reports about mortgage companies foreclosing on the wrong property. Apparently, this is something of an epidemic at GMAC Mortgage, as they told their employees yesterday to immediately halt all foreclosure proceedings in 23 states. They are also halting the sales of all properties...

Another Possible New Fee For Home Buyers And Sellers

Came across a story in the New York Times this morning about a possible new fee in the housing market. It hasn't caught on yet, and let's hope it doesn't.Some developers are trying to attach a clause to the sales contract of new homes that says the developer will receive 1% of the sales prices of the home every time it changes hands for the next 99 years. Wow. New home buyers - this is yet another reason to understand every piece of paper you are...

Status Update

Time for a status update. All my active hard money loans are current and have been paying on time. Hard money #14, which was just made mid-June, might be paid off soon. The property has been fixed up and is on the market. This guy works fast! Here's a shot of the place when my borrower purchased it:And here it is now:Looks much nicer. He took down the fence, which is something I probably wouldn't...

Time Is Of The Essence

Saw this article today about a couple in California that bought a house at a foreclosure auction. They thought they had a great deal, but it turns out they actually bought the worthless second mortgage, not the first. A few months after the auction, they received another foreclosure notice, this time for the first mortgage. As you know, the first mortgage has seniority, so the couple was pretty much screwed. At the auction for the first mortgage,...

Happy Anniversary!

This blog was started 6 years ago today! Wow.. Times flies!I was planning on posting an update about the apartment complex and a few other odds and ends today, but I've gotten swamped with other things, so I'll just say "Thanks for reading...

Breaking The Bank-Appraiser Cabal

I got a call the other day from the bank that holds the mortgage on my house. They wanted me to come in and talk with them about refinancing. They thought I could get a better rate. So on Saturday, I went in and spoke with a lady in the refi department. I could have gotten a real sweet rate – if I didn’t have my home equity line of credit. I got the HELOC near the peak of the housing bubble, so the combined value of my HELOC and my mortgage is well...

Another New Loan Made

Just a day after starting a new hard money loan, my partner contacted me with another opportunity. This is another single family home, 1,900 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths. The outside looks nice:But the inside needs about $30,000 of work. The previous owner / occupants included 7 adults, 2 kids, and 3 dogs. And no stove. You can imagine what it looks like inside. The previous owner tried to sell...

New Loan and A Sign Of The Times

As I mentioned last week, I had two loans get paid off recently. A third loan, hard money loan #8, was just paid off yesterday. This loan was somewhat unusual in that it was actually carried to the full 1 year term. I don't have any information on if the property sold or if the borrower just refinanced to pay us off and he still is working on or trying to sell the place.So, with the exception of one...

Two Loans Closing This Week

Hard money loan #12 is closing today. This one only lasted two months. That’s the shortest loan I’ve made in a while, possibly ever. The borrower almost got a discount for paying it off so quickly. The standard loan note my partner uses generally provides incentives for early payoff if made within 30 days of funding or 60 days of funding. The 60 day cutoff was June 5, so the borrower missed getting a $3,560 discount by 3 days.Hard money loan #11...

Loans Closing and Things Looking Up

It looks like hard money loan #11 is scheduled to close next Friday, the 11th. All in all, my partner says the California area where we have our hard money loans seems to be a seller’s market right now. We’ve currently got four properties in escrow. A couple buyers backed out, but new buyers were quick to appear. I expect to have my other loans paid off soon.In multi-tenant property news, I received a nice detailed state of the market analysis from...

April Apartment Complex Report

Time for another Houston apartment update! This report is much nicer than the last one. Occupancy has increased to 93% from 90% in January. This is a very nice improvement over the declining values we were seeing the last couple of months. As occupancy rose, so too did revenue – a $10,000 increase in April over March. Management expects another $5,000 increase in revenue in May. Rent concessions are down about $2,000 from March, but still at a fairly...

Loan Calculations

I seem to be in a financial clean up mode lately. First, I started converting all my paper bills and documentation to electronic form. Now, I’m taking on our debt. I pay off our credit cards in full each month, so typically the only debt I have is my home mortgage. But, last month, we bought two new cars. Prior to that, we had been car-payment free for several years. In all honesty, the idea of having two car payments makes me a little uncomfortable....

First Investment With Self-Directed IRA

It’s been a very long time in the making – five months – but I am now making my first investment with my self-directed IRA! I opened the bank account two weeks ago, the hold on my initial deposit check ended last week, and now I’ve found a new hard money investment. This one will be all the more sweet since it will be made using funds from my self-directed Roth IRA, and thus the profits will be tax-free!My partner has another hard money lending opportunity....

Harry Potter And The Mountain Of Paperwork

Last week, I wrote about my decision to try to move all my documents to electronic format. I've spent the last week converting some of them. Luckily, several of the companies I deal with provide access to electronic statements online, even if you had not signed up for them in the past. This means I was able to download, for example, the last 10 years of my brokerage statements from Charles Schwab....

Taming The Paper Beast (Updated)

I have three filing cabinets in my home – a tall four drawer letter size model for personal stuff, a two drawer lateral file cabinet for my real estate-related documents, and a two drawer letter size filing cabinet for my hard money lending documents. The four drawer cabinet is full, the lateral cabinet is getting there, and the two drawer one is still relatively empty. I’ve thought about going paperless...

Self-Directed IRA Almost Ready To Roll

I received my LLC paperwork package in the mail two days ago. Today, I received confirmation that the LLC creation notice has been published in a newspaper of record (as required by law). My next steps are:Send the IRA custodian instructions to issue a check to the LLC for the purchase of membership shares. This is where my IRA takes ownership of the LLC, thus giving me a self-directed IRA.Return the membership roster and member share certificates...

One loan ends, another starts.

Sometimes everything just falls into place at the right time. Hard money loan #10 was paid off and just a day or two later, another opportunity came up. I can roll my funds into that one with no time spent not earning interest while searching for a deal.The new opportunity is a single family house, 5 bedroom, 2.5 baths,  in a nice area of San Leandro (Northern California). The borrower is a well-experienced...

Big Update

Wow..It’s been almost three months since I started the process of setting up a self-directed IRA. Time flies! I am approaching the end to setting everything up, I believe. Probably half of the delays were my fault. First, I filled out the wrong paperwork – I filled out the Traditional IRA application instead of the Roth IRA application. I didn’t catch that until the account had been opened, so then...

Kiyosaki's Seminars Investigated

Canadian TV has a story on the Kiyosaki's Rich Dad seminars. The upshot seems to be that they are basically non-educational and nothing more than extended sales pitches for more products and seminars. (I do have to disagree with the story's characterizations of lease-options and preforeclosures - these are valid investments and I have made money using both of them.)Personally, I tend to agree. I've...

Man Bulldozes Foreclosed Home

An Ohio man lost his home to foreclosure and bulldozed his house rather than let the bank take it back. It seems he was sued and the IRS placed a lien on his home. The bank claimed the home as collateral.From what I can tell, it sounds like the guy got a loan from the bank and built the house himself. He owed $160,000 on it. The bank started foreclosure. The home was supposedly worth $350,000 and the owner had an offer to buy it for $170,000. The...

I Started Another Blog!

I started a second blog about my iPhone and what I have done to customize it.You can find it he...

Hard Money Loan #11

My partner finally found another property to invest my principle from hard money loan #9, which was paid off a little over a month ago. Hard money loan #11 is on a property picked up for one cent over opening bid at a foreclosure auction in San Ramon, California. I normally don't post photos of the properties I am lending on here, but this one is just beautiful, so I have to. For a foreclosure, this...

New Year, New Opportunities

The holidays were a pretty busy time for me and I realized I neglected to write about the performance of my Houston apartment complex investment. I also just got the update for December, so I’ll write about both now. In November, occupancy dropped to 90%, due in part to the declining Houston economy. This property still continues to outperform the other apartment complexes in the area by 3-5%. The manager expected vacancies to remain at this...

HML #9 paid off

Between Christmas and New Years, hard money loan #9 was paid off. I made a couple thousand dollars on it. I'm leaving my principle with my partner for investing in another loan when he finds a good one.Over Christmas, we had some out-of-town relatives staying with us and one night, my brother-in-law handed me a real estate listing for a property that was literally down the street from my house. It was listed for $90,000! Being that I live in the...