Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year by students paying Gurus around the Country for books, tapes, and mentorships that NEVER result in an actual real estate deal. Students see the GURUs fancy marketing websites showing them in gigantic houses, boats, and cars and believe they must know what they are doing. 

We hear the same story over and over again. Students spend $2500, $5000, and even, $10,000 on a training system but NEVER end up closing a deal from it. The are SOLD the “dream” of NO MONEY DOWN deals and DOUBLE CLOSINGS only to find out later that those kind of deals RARELY EVER CLOSE. 

With over 40 years of combined real estate experience, Jason Roberts and Scott Surgener decided it was time for a change. Jason and Scott have successfully built a national network of both Realtors and Investors who partner with their companies and utilize their brands and marketing platforms to build their own businesses around the country. 

Jason and Scott have now launched a NEW Partner Program offering a “hands on, in the field” approach to teaching beginning investors the realities and techniques they will need to become full-time investors. Each investor spends up to 3 days in Florida learning all aspects of finding, evaluating, rehabbing, and reselling investment deals. The three sectors that are taught include real estate wholesaling, rehabbing and flipping for profit, and finally the art of cash flowing for monthly income. The investor has access to the company’s entire marketing system to find their first deal in their local market. They are offered direct support thru the entire process which typically lasts from 60-90 days.

Jason Roberts, CEO of the corporation says, “We are excited to offer one of the first real estate investment programs in the country that brings a new investor to a markets where we buy and sell houses every single month to learn hands on how real investing works. Real estate is done in the field, not a ballroom.”

Scott Surgener, Senior VP says, “We get tired of hearing all of the war stories that come from people who spend thousands of dollars on books and tapes but never have the confidence to do an actual transaction. We created this program to ensure that our students have the knowledge and confidence to buy a house as well as the marketing system to get it sold. “

The program creates a partnership arrangment where much of their fee is paid after the investors sells their first real estate deal. “We do that to put our money where are mouth is so to speak.”, says Mr. Roberts.

Details of the program can be found by visiting their website.

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Changes to HAFA:

- Short sale answers must come within 30 days
- Servicers are no longer required to verify a borrower’s financial information
- Servicers are no longer required to determine if the debt-to-income exceeds 31%
- Second lien holders no longer must accept 6% of the unpaid balance.

The goal of these changes is to expedite short sales, which is good news for home owners, realtors, investors and ultimately the banks.

As always, www.sellmyhouse.com will stay on top of the results for our Realtor and investor networks.

The www.SellMyhouse.com Team

January already shapping up to be one of our best months in 3 years. Seem to be getting more access to great investment deals directly from banks and GSEs. Turn key resale system working in destination/retirement markets with cash retirement buyers. Many houses need less than $5000 rehab. 

December Results: 

• Investors annualized return rate of 102%
• Average single family purchase price $94,000.
• Average sale price $115,000.
• Average hold time 31 days. 

Jason K Roberts
President
www.AmericasBestRehabs.com
www.SellMyHouse.com 

Todd Snipes, President

www.TheDealMagnet.com

Last week Diana Olick of CNBC interviewed an investor who buys foreclosed properties and rents them out long-term for solid returns. He claims that’s the only way to right the housing market — get long-term investors to eat up the excess inventory. The biggest roadblock, however, is credit. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both limit the number of investor mortgages.

Fuse | Getty Images

Multiple sources now tell me that the Administration, specifically over at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is considering ways to get more investors into the housing market, possibly with the help of Fannie and Freddie. HUD would not confirm that, but Fannie Mae’s chief economist Doug Duncan said it is definitely on the table both at HUD and at Fannie.

“We’re certainly exploring the opportunities to expand that,” said Duncan in an interview, cautioning, “the data in our own portfolio show that when you get to a certain number, like ten is the number we’ve chosen, if there’s any default issue, all the loans go bad at the same time, so at the present time we have two mandates, one is to help provide liquidity and help with funding, but the second is to protect taxpayers as well.”

No question that any such program would have to require investors to have significant skin in the game, that is, large down payments on all properties, and perhaps a designated capital reserve level to protect against losses. Underwriting would have to be stringent, unlike what went on in the heyday of the housing boom.

Part of the problem is that the Administration doesn’t want to spend any more money on housing, and it is particularly politically unpalatable to offer financial assistance to investors, who are widely blamed for causing the housing crisis in the first place. But we’re talking about a different kind of investor here. There is an awful lot of hedge fund capital just sitting on the sidelines, if and only if the banks would let them on the field.

With home prices falling yet again, a collective $1.7 trillion of collective home equity lost in 2010, according to Zillow.com, and mortgage rates rising, more potential home buyers are being priced out of the housing market. 23 percent of borrowers are now underwater on their mortgages, which means they can’t sell to move up. Inventories are still far above a healthy level, and the shadow inventory of foreclosed properties will only add pressure to prices. I’m sure the Administration is well aware of all that, which is why officials are putting ever more pressure on Fannie and Freddie to write down mortgage principal.

“The Administration believes strongly that the FHA short refi [which involves principal write-down] is a viable option to deal with borrowers with negative equity, and outright refusal to implement a program which could have economic value to the institutions bearing the risk, we think is shortsighted,” FHA commissioner David Stevens told me.

Whether it’s principal write-down or investor incentives, it is becoming ever more abundantly clear that the housing market is not going to right itself on its own without considerably more pain.

The www.SellMyHouse.com Team

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TheDealMagnet

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have begun telling real-estate agents nationwide to resume sales of foreclosed properties that had been suspended after document-handling problems surfaced over the past two months.

Fannie said Friday it had lifted a moratorium on foreclosed-property sales following a review of the affected properties it has acquired and after consulting with its government regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It was unclear how quickly sales would resume because loan servicers are still completing their reviews of paperwork.

“Our decision was motivated by several factors including the protection of buyers with title insurance, the negative impact lingering foreclosed properties has on neighborhoods and the cost burden that is placed on taxpayers when [bank-owned] sales are suspended,” said a Fannie Mae spokeswoman.

Fannie and Freddie owned nearly 240,000 properties at the end of September, valued at nearly $24 billion. Difficulty selling those homes could lead to higher carrying costs for the mortgage titans. Delays also could prompt buyers that had been under contract to lower their asking prices or to walk away from deals.

In September, Fannie and Freddie were forced to suspend sales of certain properties amid reports that documents used to process foreclosures weren’t being properly submitted by companies that handle loan servicing and their attorneys.

A memo Fannie sent to real-estate agents on Wednesday directed agents to “proceed with scheduling and holding the closings” of sales of Fannie Mae-owned homes and to work with appropriate personnel “if a title issue arises with respect to the potential defect of an affidavit used in the underlying foreclosure.”

Freddie’s memo told agents to “resume all normal sales activity.”

The mortgage-finance giants were taken over by the government two years ago and have cost taxpayers $134 billion so far. In August, Fannie told mortgage servicers that they would face fines if foreclosures became unreasonably prolonged in a bid to avoid costly delays.

Fannie said it would resume sales for properties with loans that had been serviced by units of Ally Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., OneWest Bank and Sovereign Bank.

Foreclosures

RealtyTrac has just reported that even though the volume of foreclosed homes plunged by 25% from Q2 to Q3 and 31% from Q2 of 2009, the discount on foreclosed homes has hit a five year high, as interest in even ultra bargain properties has collapsed following the expiration of the homebuyer tax credit, and confirming yesterday’s bad Case Shiller (remember that one?) number. Per RealtyTrac: “foreclosure homes accounted for 25 percent of all U.S. residential sales in the third quarter of 2010 and that the average sales price of properties that sold while in some stage of foreclosure was more than 32 percent below the average sales price of properties not in the foreclosure process — up from a 26 percent discount in the previous quarter and a 29 percent discount in the third quarter of 2009.” Yet despite the major price drop, buying interest has evaporated as nobody there is no longer any purchasing power left in the lower and middle sections of the housing market: “a total of 188,748 U.S. properties in some stage of foreclosure — default, scheduled for auction or bank-owned (REO) — sold to third parties in the third quarter, a decrease of 25 percent from the previous quarter and a decrease of nearly 31 percent from the third quarter of 2009. The average sales price of properties in some stage of foreclosure was $169,523, down 2.46 percent from the previous quarter and down 0.44 percent from the third quarter of 2009.” And while the average price of non-foreclosed homes posted a slight uptick in Q3, the volume drop was even worse: “The average sales price of properties not in foreclosure was $249,721, up 6.42 percent from the previous quarter and up 4.36 percent from the third quarter of 2009. Sales volume of non-foreclosure properties decreased 29 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 31 percent from the third quarter of 2009.”

However, the real scary issue is relayed in a recent Charlie Rose interview with housing expert Robert Shiller:

Charlie Rose: You’ve said that 90% of the housing market is supported by the government.
Robert Shiller: Well, it’s 80% or 90%. Really almost the whole market now is government. And we know this can’t last.

Rose: And that means prices are being artificially inflated?
Shiller: It seems to. Government support is especially prominent in sales of existing homes, which shot up to over 6 million on an annual rate in November 2009, the month that the home buyer tax credit initially was supposed to expire.

Fannie Mae has reported the rate of serious delinquencies (90 Days overdue) for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business jolted to to 5.52% in January from 5.38% in December. This is a 100% increase since January 2009. But look at the chart below and explain to me how we are anywhere near an end to this housing crisis!

It is our stance that we still have some real issues to work thru before we can claim “an end to the housing crisis”.

Jason Roberts

Founder & CEO

www.SellMyHouse.com

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases lenders may allow a borrower to skip payments altogether.

Haven’t we been through this already with the loan modification programs of the past year? Less than 200,000 permanent loan modifications have been secured since the program was enacted.

The new wrinkle will be the administrations push to deal directly with the massive number of mortgages that are ‘underwater’. They could offer financial incentives for the first time to lenders to cut the loan balances of such distressed homeowners. Those who are still current on their mortgages could get the chance to refinance on better terms into loans backed by the FHA.

I do think this could help stop people from walking away just because it is underwater who can actually afford their house payment. However, as a general thought, it feels a lot like just one more government attempt to help boost numbers thru the remainder of the year so that we can get past the elections.

Lets be honest, government attempts to resolve the housing crisis have been a miserable failure. More importantly, it has strapped the tax payer with a debt level that has never been seen in this country’s history. That will have a much longer negative effect on the housing market than the false boost we have been given from the tax credit offered.  Despite billions of dollars in government incentives, home sales and new construction totals are sinking, not expanding. 

The truth, as hard is it may be to accept, is that this is a supply and demand issue. Until supply is worked thru, the housing market will not recover substantially. The foreclosure inventory has to be taken out of the system. New home builds will not recover until ‘cheap’ houses are not an option to purchase. Who in their right mind would pay $300,000 for a new house when they can buy a similar house with more square footage that is only a few years old for half of that total?

Existing house values rise as a direct result of new home construction. New housing construction has also proven to be a leading indicator for an overall economic recovery.

To me it is pretty simple, we fix the problem by expediting the foreclosure inventory thru the system as quickly as possible. Until that excess inventory is removed from the system, the housing market will not recover. HAMP and other government programs will just drag out the inevitable supply and demand issue.

I wrote an article last fall discussing my ideas on how to fix the problem. I’ve been in countless board room and conference call discussions with industry leaders about this very thing. I’m still convinced to this day that dealing with supply will ultimately resolve the demand issue, and event he economic problems we face.

Jason K Roberts

CEO

www.SellMyHouse.com

For borrowers who are making their payments on time but are on the verge of default, the Obama administration’s loan modification program can reduce their credit score as much as 100 points. That makes it harder to get a loan and can present a problem when applying for a new job.

Housing counselors say it’s unfair, especially because the news often comes as a surprise to homeowners.

“Why should people’s credit be hurt even worse when they’re trying to do the right thing?” said Eileen Anderson, senior vice president at Community Development Corp. of Long Island, a housing counseling group in New York.

And many homeowners are angry that a program designed to help carries such a penalty, said Kathy Conley, a housing counselor with GreenPath Inc., a nonprofit group in Farmington Hills, Mich.

“It’s a feeling of being duped,” she said.

The Treasury Department guidelines require that mortgage companies notify credit bureaus of the loan modification process.

Worse yet, we have heard multiple cases where homeowners are not getting their trial loan modifications made permanent. So not only are you struggling to stay current on your payment while taking a beating on your credit, there is no real way to know of the bank will actually allow you to continue on the new payment plan. Many times you are just paying a lower monthly payment over 40 years. Trust us, you arent paying less over time if this is the case.

www.SellMyHouse.com

Staff Writer

That means for the most part, retail buyers wont buy short sales leaving only investors. Investors do not pay retail prices of course, and banks dont want to accept wholesale offers. You get the paradox here??  

Here are the considerations being discussed:

1. Homeowners get $1500 to sell and move. The bank servicing the first mortgage gets $1000 and the second mortgage bank get $1000 to forgive the balance. The first mortgage holder gets the proceeds from the sale.
2. Realtors will determine the value of the home.
3. The homeowner will not be told the valuation.
4. Banks will be required to accept all offers that meet or exceed the predetermined value.

Our main question is will any of this actually speed up the process of getting a deal approved and closed. If it doesnt, well at least in our view, it is political jockeying for the next election cycle that begins in a few months.

What do you think?

www.SellMyHouse.com