Bulk REO Investment Tips

With more foreclosures now than ever before, America’s weak real estate market seems to set new dismal records each month. However, opportunistic real estate investment professionals are turning the recession into great profits with a bit of creativity.

This new opportunity – known as ‘Bulk REO Investing’ – is so huge it’s captured attention from wealthy investors and private investment funds alike.

The basis of the Bulk REO business is foreclosures, so let’s analyze the foreclosure process now.

You can’t understand Bulk REO Investments without understanding the process of foreclosure.

A home owner who misses one or more mortgage payments is faced with an ever-increasing volume of threatening correspondence from their lender. The lender directs the subsequent timing of the actual foreclosure proceedings. Between the formal beginning of the foreclosure process and the public auction is the ‘preforeclosure’ period.

To complete the foreclosure process, the property is auction to the public. If the property is not purchased at auction, ownership reverts to the original lender. This property is then considered to be ‘Real Estate Owned’ by the lender, also known as an ‘REO’ property.

Lenders usually try to unload their REO properties at close to retail price by listing their REO’s with a real estate broker. However, REO properties are now frequently sold for far less than their ‘book value’. The trade-off is that the buyer must purchase multiple REO properties in each transaction.

The recession in the United States has yielded huge profits to real estate investors prepared to take advantage. Bulk REO Investors are most successful when they have a well-established source of funding for their REO packages. There are many sources of funding for these transasactions including: hard money and commercial financing, as well as non conventional sources such as hedge funds and private investors. Additionally, one man is becoming very well known in the field of bulk REO investing, and his name is Sal Buscemi of Dandrew Capital Partners, a hedge fund in New York.