Bulk REO Investment 101
There are more foreclosures in the United States right now than we have ever experienced before. Yet well-funded investors in real estate are seizing upon this opening to profit from an profoundly profitable new opportunity.
The new opportunity is known as ‘Bulk REO Investing’ or ‘REO Package Investing’ and it’s a huge opportunity.
Let’s take a moment to analyze the basics of this incredibly lucrative business.
You can’t understand Bulk REO Investments without understanding the process of foreclosure.
A home owner who misses one or more mortgage payments is faced with an ever-increasing volume of threatening correspondence from their lender. The formal process of foreclosure begins at the lender’s discretion. The name for this period is ‘preforeclosure’.
The defaulted property is ultimately auctioned, thus completing the foreclosure process. If the property is not purchased at auction, ownership reverts to the original lender. The property then receives the designation of being an ‘REO’ or the more formal name, ‘Real Estate Owned’.
Local real estate agents are usually used to resale REO properties at retail price to the general public. However, lenders are increasingly willing to take much less than their REO asset is actually worth. This happens because the buyer of the REO is required to purchase multiple REO’s in a single transaction.
Qualified real estate investors are increasingly finding once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in these REO packages. Bulk REO Investors are most successful when they have a well-established source of funding for their REO packages. Some sources of funding for these transactions are: personal funds, hard money lenders, commercial lenders and non-conventional sources such as private investors and hedge funds. Additionally, one man is becoming very well known in the field of bulk REO investing, and his name is Salvatore Buscemi of Dandrew Partners, a hedge fund in New York.
