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

By Dirk van Dijk

Housing Starts rose in November to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 555,000 from 534,000 in September, an increase of 3.9%. The October numbers were revised higher from 519,000, so it is possible to see the increase as 21,000 or 6.9%.

Relative to a year ago, they are down 5.8%. Quite frankly, a year ago was a pretty lousy time for the home builders, as well.

If one looks at only single-family houses, the improvement was somewhat better, rising to 465,000 from 435,000 in October (revised down slightly from 436,000), an increase of 6.9%. The volatile multi-family (condo and co-op) sector plunged 18.2% to an annual rate of just 72,000 (although October was revised much higher to 88,000 from 74,000 units). Year over year, single-family starts are down 5.8% and multi-family starts are down 7.7%.

The total starts number was above consensus expectations of a 545,000 annual rate. While the increase, the upward revisions and the beat of expectations are all good news, at least in terms of short-term economic growth, one should not forget just how depressed things are in the housing market.

Housing Starts peaked in June of 2006 at an annual rate of 2.273 million. We are thus still 75.6% off of the peak levels.

Housing Starts Extremely Important
It is hard to overstate just how important housing starts are to the economy. Yes, at this point, residential investment has declined to the point where it looks almost insignificant — just 2.22% of GDP in the third quarter, down from over 6.34% of GDP at the height of the housing bubble. However, historically, residential investment — of which new home construction is the largest part — has always been the main locomotive in pulling the economy out of recessions.

Take a good hard look at the first graph below and the relationship between when the lines bottom and the light blue recession bars. If you want to know why this recovery seems so anemic, look no further than this graph.

Even the 2001 recession, which was not caused by a housing downturn, saw a sharp acceleration in housing starts as the recession came to an end. Of course, since starts were jumping but were not starting from a depressed level, that boom later became known as the housing bubble that put us in this mess to begin with. Every other recession was preceded by a sharp fall in housing starts. 

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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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Jason, Scott, and Todd want to hear from you as to your thoughts, goals, and strategies for 2011. Here’s our weekly update on all things relavent to real estate.

Home values lose $1.7 trillion in 2010 – CNNMoney has a story today about the dollar loss in real estate value for 2010. As just about everyone in real estate knows, the homebuyer tax credit propped up the first half of 2010, but really just served to pull most people who would have purchased later in the year, into the first half. Distressed home sellers continue to make up a huge portion of the real estate market – do you have a plan to resolve this problem or to target these properties for purchase?  Need to stop foreclosure? 

Want to learn how or where to buy cheap houses?
Strategic Planning - Speaking of planning, it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day, but as the year ends, have you reviewed (or started!) your strategic plan? I’ve found that creating a strategic plan for the year and then reviewing it monthly and weekly has had a huge positive impact on our business, especially during turbulent times. One of the simplest, easy to use tools for this is Verne Harnish’s One Page Strategic Plan.

2011 Outlook – Next year will continue to be turbulent for real estate. From the thousands of “motivated” home sellers contacting us each month, we continue to see a very high number of foreclosures on the horizon. Because most sellers contact us before they are behind in their payments or in foreclosure, it gives us a 6-8 month outlook on the national housing market. Companies that figure out how to work with current real estate market conditions should thrive next year! Those that “hunker down” waiting for the market to “come back” may be gone in 12 months. What is your strategy?

The www.SellMyHouse.com Team

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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.”

This is the website that will be utilized to show investment properties to their national network of over 50,000 investors. The website will market REO, preforeclosure, wholesale, and rehab properties to investors seeking cheap houses.

Since 1995, the organization’s built by Jason Roberts and Scott Surgener have developed a reputation as one of the most trusted and respected real estate organizations in the business. Over the years, we have expanded into a national company and are considered to be one of the foremost experts in the real estate investment community, investing primarily in distressed foreclosure properties while helping our clients stop foreclosure via short sale or quick sales via our investor network.

As one of the first investment companies to control the process from lead generation to resale, the owners have spoken in front of several investment and Realtor groups all over the Country. Jason Roberts, CEO of Merida Marketing Co Inc says, “The launch of the new website will help to expand our network to all corners of the country. This gives us a platform to advertise the wholesale deals that come thru our network.”

“Many new investors get caught up in the late night infomercials and seminars being offered by gurus right now. Our job is to seperate fact from fiction and put them on the right path to make sure they have the tools needed to make money as an investor,” partner Todd Snipes explains , from www.TheDealMagnet.com.

The website can also be accessed thru their main client website www.SellMyHouse.com via the Wholesale Properties tab on the left navigation menu.

The company makes it’s money from a Buyer’s Premium which is added to the offer price. The website is operated by JKR & Associates Inc., the group’s licensed Real Estate corporation in Illinois.

Investors can get started by creating an account to list their wholesale houses by visiting www.AmericasBestRehabs.com.

The group also operates the SellMyHouse.com Radio Network which discusses everything real estate related with guests from around the Country.

More information can be found by visiting www.SellMyHouse.com, www.AmericasBestRehabs.com, and www.TheDealMagnet.com.