Wealth Building

How To Get Started With Bulk REO Investing

November 8th, 2009

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.

That opportunity is called Bulk REO Investing, and the opportunity is huge.

Let’s take a moment to analyze the basics of this incredibly lucrative business.

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. After a certain period, the lender will then formally begin foreclosure proceedings. Between the formal beginning of the foreclosure process and the public auction is the ‘preforeclosure’ period.

When a defaulted property is placed up for auction, the foreclosure process is completed. The lender regains ownership of the property if there are no buyers at auction. The property then receives the designation of being an ‘REO’ or the more formal name, ‘Real Estate Owned’.

Lenders have no interest in owning property, and thus usually opt to list their REO properties with a local real estate broker in hopes of a retail sale. However, REO properties are now frequently sold for far less than their ‘book value’. But the price of receiving such great pricing is the need to purchase multiple REO properties (a ‘package’) rather than individual properties.

These REO packages represent the potential to acquire huge amounts of equity for savvy real estate investors. 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 Salvatore Bushemi of Dandrew Partners, a hedge fund in New York.