Top 7 Fears of Real Estate Investors

The Top 7 Fears of Real Estate Investors Today

1. Lack of Cash - Personal incomes are dropping. Unemployment is nearing record highs. Renters in most markets are defaulting. Credit card companies

are cutting the amount of cash available even for those who have amazing credit scores

and always pay back on time.

2. Lack of Confidence - Many investors are lacking confidence in their ability to get through the next three years of this huge downturn. For example, many investors are finding that it's taking months to close a property deal. If you're working real estate short sale strategies, because banks are so burdened with offloading inventory, you could wait six months just to receive a BPO (Broker's Price Opinion).

3. Loan Challenges - A friend of mine couldn't even refinance

his house for a lower mortgage payment than what he's paying right now because the household income dropped since his wife's death. If he can't refinance his home for a lower payment, what do you think your chances of getting a loan are? What's more, banks have raised down payment requirements on residential and commercial properties to as much as 40%.

4. Can't Find Deals - The majority of housing and condo sales are foreclosures, as homeowners don't want to sell now and lose all the value that they put into the house.

5. Not Enough Buyers - Yes, incentives like the tax credit are beginning to enter the market. Yes, we are starting to see a reduction in new inventories. The key word is "starting." Yet in many markets, investors are finding a lack of buyers even at bargain prices!

6. Takes Too Much Time - Many old-hat real estate investors are spending their days and nights trying to close deals. Most of their time is spent late at night on their computers, or traveling around the country hopping from one airport to the next, in hopes of getting that six- or seven-figure real estate deal done, just to be disappointed again and again.

7. Lack of Knowledge - Old-hat real estate investing requires you to understand negotiation strategies, NLP mind tricks, what's-working-now techniques, real estate contracts, and how to adapt to opportunities in more than one marketplace, using more than one investing strategy.

When will Real estate return to its peak values?

From Moody's:

Free For All Links to Interesting Articles

Top 6 Financial Articles of the Day:

1) Homeowners Becoming Reluctant Landlords

2) Goodbye Fannie/Freddie, hello McGee? Simply put, the MCGE buys mortgages from banks, pools them into securities, pays an insurance premium to a new government fund and then sells them to investors with government guarantees against the default of those securities. So the investors take the interest rate risk but they are not taking a credit risk.

3) Has the Obama administration failed already? Here are 10 things to do to restore their hope

4) An inventive way to clean up foreclosed homes with pools

5) Florida may invest in Florida real estate

6) Making the switch from being nice to banks to being tough on them

A look at Underwater Home Mortgages- 50% of homeowners by 2011?

Courtesy of Deutsche Bank- click for 19 page report

Only the Lonely...funny can't make it up real estate stories of the day

Seems like this stuff is ridiculous but true...

Victor Vangelakos lives in a luxury condominium tower on the Caloosahatchee River. He never has to worry about the neighbors making too much noise.
There are no neighbors.Vangelakos, 45, his wife Cathy and their three children are the only residents in the 32-story Oasis I condo on the east edge of downtown Fort Myers.

At the same time, our idiot Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner can't sell his own house...maybe because, I dunno, its WAY overpriced??? Daily Show skewers him!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Home Crisis Investigation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Banks making more $$$ from Foreclosures than Loan Mods

And now, the truth starts coming out...the banks would rather foreclose than do a loan modification out of a belief that many people are capable of "self curing" their default and don't need to do a loan mod.

The problem is that modifying mortgages is profitable to banks for only one set of distressed borrowers, while lenders are actually dealing with three very different types. Modification makes economic sense for a bank or other lender only if the borrower can't sustain payments without it yet will be able to keep up with new, more modest terms.

A second set are those who are likely to fall behind on their payments again even after receiving a modified loan and are likely to lose their homes one way or another. Lenders don't want to help these borrowers because waiting to foreclose can be costly.

Finally, there are those delinquent borrowers who can somehow, even at great sacrifice, catch up without a modification. Lenders have little financial incentive to help them.

When Your State Goes From NonRecourse to Recourse Mortgages

Hat tip to Housing Doom on this one...

I smell the law of unintended consequences about to happen here...the state of Arizona, in their infinite wisdumb, have decided to make some mortgages into recourse mortgages (where you have to pay back the entire amount), a change from it being non-recourse. (where you just lose title to the home).

The new law would affect any Arizona homeowner in foreclosure who has not lived in the home for six straight months. This might include landlords, second-home owners and investors who bought homes hoping for quick resales and big profits. Once the home is sold in foreclosure, the homeowner would have to pay back the remaining value of the loan, minus the proceeds from the foreclosure sale. Currently, Arizona homeowners, including investors, who lose a house to foreclosure take a big hit on their credit scores but aren't usually required to pay back lenders.