There’s a lot of excitement brewing around the investment opportunities that are becoming available in light of the ongoing foreclosures and REO auctions in the real estate market. But be careful how you play this game, there are as many scams out there as there are opportunities.

Ever hear those ads on AM radio that promise to teach you a simple no-money-down, no-experience-needed, magical method of becoming a real estate investor at a three-hour seminar? Or the newest one, the guy who says he can teach you how to fix-and-flip properties for big profits - just like he does on TV? (My four year old daughter has figured out that what she watches on TV isn’t real, so why does this guy think I’ll fall for that?)

A friend of mine shared an article in Money Magazine with me that seemed to expose one of these scams. The article is about a training program that teaches investors how to make money on foreclosures. Granted, foreclosure investing is a complex business and there’s plenty to learn, but the article makes this training sound like little more than lessons in cold calling. And while this journalist found plenty of folks putting out thousands of dollars for the course, he didn’t identify more than one succesful student of the program.

It’s just a reminder, there’s no free lunch. Foreclosure investing is a profitable business (one of my best friends does very well at it). And this market is going to provide tremendous values in the form of REO properties and bank foreclosure auctions. But like anything else, if there’s an investment opportunity that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So before you write a check to some “Guru” to learn how to make money in this real estate market, talk to someone who’s actually doing it. And if they make it sound really hard, then they’re probably telling the truth.

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Once again I turned on my computer (atually, it’s a computer that Brian let me borrow until the insurance company replaces mine) and in my news feeder there’s a new article about how bad the housing market is. OK, the article is about NAR’s latest home sales statistics, which indicate that prices are dropping and homes sales have slowed to the most desperate pace since they started keeping the statistics in 1999.

While I’m sure all of their research and numbers are accurate, and it’s true that the housing market has slowed, these national housing numbers are mostly irrelevant to you and me, or the guy down the street who’s selling his house.

To say that prices are down 5.7% this month, or that sales are off 20% year over year is misleading. It’s like saying that it’s 55 degrees and partly cloudy in the United States right now. There just isn’t a national real estate market. It’s a very localized business.

Your neighborhood may be worse off than the national average, or it may be doing better. Like the weather, it depends where you’re at. It’s always 5-10 degrees cooler on the Castro Valley side of the hill than it is in Pleasanton. When it’s warm in the East Bay, it tends to be foggy and cold in the City. You know how it goes. And so does the real estate market. While Pleasanton and San Ramon are holding-up well, markets like Tracy and Hayward are languishing.

There’s a lot to say on the markets, bt my point this morning is that these national statistics that the media runs around with really need to be taken with a grain of salt. If you want to know what’s going on in your neighborhood, talk to a local expert. And if you’re trying to figure out what to wear today, don’t use the satellite image of the entire country, get a local forecast!

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I promised a piece on the real estate auction almost two weeks ago, so here it is. Fact is, I’ve had a lot of time and a lot of conversations to help me digest my first real estate auction experience, and I’ve boiled it down to the three elements of the day that really surprised me.

1. This is the real deal. Insurable title, no back taxes or leins, five percent down and a 30 day cash contract. Serious investors making real deals on bank owned properties. And they’re deals - serious deals. I saw several homes, nice homes that you or I would live in, sell for 100 grand under their already reduced list prices. No joke.
2. Emotion wasn’t a factor. I really believed that the purpose of the real estate auction was to create the emotion or the frenzy that would drive competing bidders to pay more for a bank owned property than they would on the open market. But that’s not what I saw. I saw sophistocated investors who had researched and valued these properties and were bidding on them in a very business-like manner.
3. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. I saw about 200 homes get auctioned a week ago Sunday. They were all in the Sacramento area and they sold from $50,000 to over $350,000. It took six and a half hours and three different auctioneers working in non-stop twenty-minute shifts. It seemed huge at the time. Then I recollected some of the  historical numbers that are being thrown around regarding foreclosures and sub-prime loans. And I realized, this is only the beginning.

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Sorry I’m late. I was supposed to write a post last night, and the plan was to write about the live real estate auction that I spent sixteen hours participating in on Sunday. But I had a little mishap on my way home and well, I’ve got a new post in mind.

I headed out of the office a little early yesterday. It is after all a holiday week, and I’m already in a holiday mood. We had a really good Monday Sales Meeting I thought - lots of good feedback on the discussions around social networking sites as well as an intense exchange around the auction that took the meeting a half hour past our regular stopping point. It was a small group (holiday week) but a really productive time together.

So I’m sneaking out early to get home to the Broncos on Monday Night Football.It’s dark already at 5:00pm as I head up Vasco Road towards Brentwood. Vasco is famous for deadly head-on crashes, although there have been relatively few in the past three years since I moved out here thanks to road improvements and speed enforcement by the CHP. In fact, just last night officer Joiner of the CHP was telling me that Marsh Creek Road between Clayton and Brentwood is the new hot spot for deadly head-on crashes.

Vasco Road still presents it dangers however, evidenced by the fact that I was having said conversation with Officer Joiner on the shoulder of that very highway last night.

You see, about halfway through the 19 mile stretch from Livermore to Bretwood, some guy who had failed to tie-down his overstuffed armchair was stopping right in the middle of traffic to make an illegal u-turn to retrieve his fallen furniture. (It’s a good thing he did, a Lazy Boy in the southbound lane isn’t a good thing for anyone.) So I, along with the three or four cars between me ant the pick-up truck came to a dead stop, right there in the single northbound lane, in the dark, on Vasco Road.

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I made some new friends this evening, a really nice couple from San Ramon who were referred by a colleague. This couple isn’t the typical real estate client, at least not typical to me. They’re introducing me to the emerging world of real estate auctions.

We’re all aware of the real estate markets in California that are over-saturated with inventory, and we’ve heard plenty about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that created this situation. Now comes the product, or the result of those markets: the liquidation of that inventory through public auctions.

Good or bad, these real estate auctions are going to be around for a while. Some industry folks I know have warned against the emotion and excitement that’s created by the auction process, suggesting that the event can drive prices up to and even beyond market value. Others, like my new friends, have had experience at these auctions and are certain that there are deals to be had.

The real estate auction we’re headed to on Sunday is being conducted by Hudson and Marshall and looks to feature over two hundred homes in the greater Sacramento area. My friends have picked a few houses that they like and they’ve scouted them out. They’ve done some research to determine what they think they’re worth and what they’re willing to pay. They’re looking at purchasing up to three homes - assuming they can secure the bargain prices that they’re hoping for.

So we’ll head up there on Sunday morning to drive by some more houses, and hopefully get inside to view some of the properties that we’re serious about. And then we’ll be at the Raddison by one o’clock to check-in and get our seats. What happens after that, I can’t be sure. But I can tell you this - it won’t be the last real estate auction in Northern California.

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So here we go - this is my third attempt at a blog this year. I’ve been to all the training sessions, hired the consultant, spent countless hours reading the real estate tomato and copyblogger and every-other article in the CAR magazine (California Association of Realtors - not Car and Drive, but I’ve read those too). Blogging is all the rage, especially in real estate, and I’m determined to jump on this train no matter how many times I fall off in the process.

I don’t know that I’ve actually figured out how this blog thing is going to work, but I’ve definitely formed an opinion, and it’s got to be as valid as anyone else’s.

The blog is about allowing my readers to get to know me. I think I can handle that. I can write frequently about myself and my life and my thoughts on the world. And who knows, I may become an entertaining writer and develop a following. Hey, it could happen.

The blog is about business development. This is the hard part. I’m supposed to write about real estate and the tri-valley and demonstrate my expertise, all the while working-in my keywords so that I come up in Google searches. Seems so phony… Read the rest of this entry »

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