Do you live or invest in Riverside, California? or maybe Cincinnati, Ohio? or possibly in Jacksonville Florida?
Twice a day, would-be real estate blog moguls gather on the local courthouse steps for the latest can't-miss opportunity in California's land rush: the foreclosure auction.
The truth according to this foreclosure site is that real estate investing can be a tad dicey if you don't have a clue what you're doing.
Beneath the shade of a magnolia tree, veterans and "newbies"crowd around auctioneer Gary Oberdalhoff as he lists a property whose owners couldn't pay the mortgage, one of thousands to go on the block in this sprawling, arid region 50 miles east of Los Angeles.
"Do I have any opening bids?" Oberdalhoff asks. Several step forward to show him cashier's checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the bidding begins.
It might be a scene straight out of the Great Depression, if you ignore the Bluetooth wireless headsets.
A record level of home foreclosures has hit the U.S. housing sector after years of reckless lending to risky borrowers. To those on the courthouse steps, that spells opportunity. Unlike during the Great Depression, investors are still eager to enter the market.
"A lot of people's misery is other people's gains," says investor Bryon Bettencourt. "It's just the way of the world, dog eat dog."
As the nation's real-estate boom curdles, speculators who a year ago might have camped out in front of new housing developments are now hoping to find a bargain among the thousands of houses emptied by foreclosure.
But veterans say true bargains are becoming harder to find as the number of homes on the auction block swells, when the pros do their homework the start here www.tracforeclosures.com
Few places have felt the impact of the slowing market more than this fast-growing region known as the Inland Empire of Southern California.
Twice a day, and sometimes on saturday, would-be real estate moguls gather on the local courthouse steps for the latest can't-miss opportunity in California's land rush: the foreclosure auction.
Starting in the 1970s, the Inland Empire's orange groves gave way to subdivisions as families migrated from the coast in search of relatively affordable housing.
As property values marched higher over the past decade, homeowners refinanced their mortgages to pay for vacations and new cars. Thanks to risk-tolerant "subprime" lenders, people with a history of bankruptcy and maxed-out credit cards were able to enter the housing market with loans charging higher rates for borrowers with lower credit quality.
But many of these new homeowners couldn't afford their mortgages, or fell behind when their adjustable monthly payments shot up. Two years ago, they might have been able to sell the house for a healthy profit. But that's not an option now that prices have stopped rising.
Several times a day, would-be real estate moguls gather on the local courthouse steps for the latest can't-miss opportunity in Nevada's land rush: the foreclosure auction.