Do you really believe that 's your best course of action?
If you're a real estate agent, you have company. I'm a licensed broker too. After 2007 the market just blew up. Probably like you, I figured that as the number of agents dropped like a stone, there would be enough sales to let the strong make a living. Unfortunately, that just didn't come to pass. Everyone is saying this market was unforeseeable. That's not true if we're honest with ourselves. We knew that third quarter late pays for 2006 were a record breaker.
I also looked into broker price opinions as a way to help defray costs and maybe even make a buck or two. The more I considered it, however, the more I found problems with it.
Of course eveyone thinks that doing a broker price opinion eventually gets you foreclosure listings. Nope.
Next, you don't really make anything when its all said and done.
3. Even with the number of foreclosures now and coming up, you can't make a living with this.
Of course I am preaching to the choir. Your field is real estate and the skills are not transferrable. Well, I have your answer. I've stumbled upon a new way to use your skills as a realtor to pull in nutty cash.The money comes from foreclosures, of all places. And the amounts and the story behind these monies will shock you. Okay, not so long ago, here's what we found.
It all begin about 5 years ago. I was involved in deed flipping with a friend. My investor and I bought a deed from an owner just before foreclosure. We were going to later sell the deed to an investor at the foreclosure sale. For the first time ever, no one bought the deed. There was only a first mortgage against the house. The property was going to sell for quite a bit more at the auction. The point was to sell the deed to one of the bidders. That bidder would then be able to redeem the deed for just what was being foreclosed upon and own the property. The bidder would save quite a bit because the home was bid above the total of the deed cost and the payoff of the mortgage. We couldn't sell the deed at the foreclosure sale. Of course we had the option of paying off the mortgage and owning the home outright.. But we were stretched on other deals. So after the foreclosure we checked the file to see what happened.
When we opened that file we could not believe our eyes. In this case the house sold at auction for far over the amount owed against it. The $50,000 overage - aka surplus funds - had been sent to the clerk of the superior court. We soon were told that the clerk always ended up with the overage. Further inquiries revealed that, as the deed holders, we were entitled to the funds.
The deed had cost us only a few thousand dollars. We were going to end up with over $45K just for owning the deed!
Of course, this changed everything. We went back to the court house to see if we could get a list of other overages that had been deposited. After an incredible amount of dead ends, we got our hands on the list. And it was a really big list.
And we found the loophole that would allow us to make way more than a mere finder makes.
