I keep hearing the rising interest rate has led huge increases in adjustable rate mortgage payment for a lot of home owners. A friend of mine has an ARM and she has a couple of years before the rate starts changing.

Nationwide foreclosure appears to be on the rise. How does the Twin Cities fare in the foreclosure department?

Foreclosures are on the rise! There are wonderful deals to be had. I have numerous clients purchasing foreclosures. They are a wonderful way to take advantage of someone else's financial predicament. It's important to know there is often a lot of "red tape" when purchasing these homes. Many of the homes are what are called "short sales" These are home where more is owed than the home is worth. That happens when an appraisal comes in inflated and the bank allows you to borrow more than it's worth. With declining prices over the past year, it's becoming more and more prevalent. These types of sales require a lot of negotiations amongst the banks executives and their attorneys. It can take one month or more to hear whether your offer has been accepted.

The best way to pay as little as possible for these homes is to come in with as much cash as possible and a FAST closing date. That is very enticing to a bank.

Where do you find foreclosed properties? Do you buy them at auction places? I thought they were not listed as the regular homes for sale.

Some are listed on the regular MLS sites and others are through special Forclosure sites that you need subscriptions to access. One you can look at is www.minnesotareo.com. I can always email some listings if you have perimeters that you are hoping to find in a foreclosure.

But...you do need to be careful when buying foreclosed properties.
Make sure you have an independant inspection done prior to buying. If folks could not make their mortgage payments, you can almost guarantee they did not make any investments into keeping up the property.

Another tip: Make sure you can afford to carry this mortgage if your plans to rehab and sell it do not run as quickly as you thought.

Nationwide, the foreclosure rate jumped up 40%!!! That is a lot of unhappy home owners, or former home owners.

WhatsUp wrote:

Where do you find foreclosed properties? Do you buy them at auction places? I thought they were not listed as the regular homes for sale.

I post foreclosures on my website for free.
I have a section for short sales too, but we are too new to have many short sale listings yet.

Definetly something you want a licensed agent for that has experience in foreclosures

Let me know if I can help.
Mr. Kelly Johnson
1-800-990-4480
Kelly@RealEstateDump.com
www.RealEstateDump.com

Nifty site. I'm not sure who made it for you but you might want to give them a bit of a tisk tisk. Frames are so 1995 and as such it makes it pretty much impossible to just send a direct link to a house I'm interested in to a friend. I am surprised, however, to see that the site actually displays fairly well in a text based browser which means that it may not be a total wash for blind browsers.

CSS is the way to go for new sites, especially with Internet Explorer 8 being standards compliant now. CSS will pretty much curb stomp anything you can do with frames while at the same time killing any need to specify font, size and color for every line of text on your site. In stead you'll define it once and use it in many places. The trouble you'll run in to now is like that with the list of counties you can view forclosures in. Isanti and Chisago are different sizes from the rest for no apparent reason. It does look like a CSS file is included for the site, but it's really limited and thus is not being used for some of the features that CSS is really good for.

Moving beyond layout though, your site is filled with useful information. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of a list of county property records sites. And a blog could be a useful tool for posting information about how to read some of the listings, new listings of particular interest, further explainations of tips and tricks or pitfalls to watch out for that may be partially covered by local news.

praecorloth wrote:

Nifty site. I'm not sure who made it for you but you might want to give them a bit of a tisk tisk. Frames are so 1995 and as such it makes it pretty much impossible to just send a direct link to a house I'm interested in to a friend. I am surprised, however, to see that the site actually displays fairly well in a text based browser which means that it may not be a total wash for blind browsers.

CSS is the way to go for new sites, especially with Internet Explorer 8 being standards compliant now. CSS will pretty much curb stomp anything you can do with frames while at the same time killing any need to specify font, size and color for every line of text on your site. In stead you'll define it once and use it in many places. The trouble you'll run in to now is like that with the list of counties you can view forclosures in. Isanti and Chisago are different sizes from the rest for no apparent reason. It does look like a CSS file is included for the site, but it's really limited and thus is not being used for some of the features that CSS is really good for.

Moving beyond layout though, your site is filled with useful information. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of a list of county property records sites. And a blog could be a useful tool for posting information about how to read some of the listings, new listings of particular interest, further explainations of tips and tricks or pitfalls to watch out for that may be partially covered by local news.

Thanks for the tips.
I chose that developer because they were local, and specialize in real estate websites. So they were able to incorporate a lot of the website from their existing business, which kept their quote very reasonable. They didn't have a learning curve.

I needed to keep costs down because I didn't particularly start it to make a profit, but to help dump some of my own properties. Which explains the name. Hope I can help other people out from under their financial problems too. And of course help buyers get some great deals in a win-win.

Beyond that, I'd heard of html before.... Isn't CSS a drug store? JK.

Your right about the text fonts and sizes. A lot more difficult to standardize throughout the pages than I thought it should be. Over time I should be able to get everything one size and font. Be a lot cooler if I ddn't have to worry about that.

Mr. Kelly Johnson
1-800-990-4480
Kelly@RealEstateDump.com
www.RealEstateDump.com

Well getting someone who specializes in your business overrules perfection in a website. The website can always be changed later, but getting up and running as soon as possible is always a good thing.

Hey just a passing thought, you might have your developer add a feature that would allow someone to type in the MLS number and bring up the house information. Right now if I wanted to look at houses and show my wife the ones that I'm interested in, we'd have to find time to sit down together and browse. Or if my friend was looking I'd email him and say, "Go to this website, search in Hennepin county and go to page 4 and it's the 2nd house down."

Some of the more advanced features like searching for X number of bedrooms + this price range + this square footage range + any number of possible combination of any number of possible features would be pretty rough to code. But a feature for bringing up a specific house based on MLS number should be a quick an easy.

Thought I'd post my loss mitigation contact list for mortgage lenders.
It's quite the collection that I have spent a lot of time gathering.

Probably the most complete list of contact information for banks around the nation for their loss mitigation departments you will find.
And it's completely free.

Would just like to see it go to use.

You must have Microsoft Excel to open: Click here for the direct link.
http://www.realestatedump.com/files/Loss_Mit_and_bank_contacts.xls

Or go to our real estate agent resource page here:
http://www.realestatedump.com/resources_102238.html
and click on "Lender Database"

Great for short sale specialists, real estate agents, brokers, loan modification specialists, foreclosure counselors, etc.

Mr. Kelly Johnson
1-800-990-4480
Kelly@RealEstateDump.com
www.RealEstateDump.com