Foreclosure Specialist

I spent the last couple of days up in beautiful Milpitas, California attending a seminar called The Foreclosure Specialist. I’ve attended a lot of training sessions, workshops, and seminars about real estate – but I must stay, this was the best one I’ve been to. It was loaded with information about the three stages of the foreclosure process (pre-foreclosure, auction, and the “REO” stage where the lender takes back the property and now has to sell it).

I was sitting in class yesterday morning, waiting for the session to start. I have a Treo 700p (terrible phone, don’t buy one – now maybe that the iPhone has dropped $200 in price, I’ll get one of those), and I can kind-of surf the web on it. One of my favorite sites is the L.A. Times, because they have a good mobile edition. And, sure enough, there on the headline news of the L.A. Time was a story about foreclosures going to record highs:

Sub-prime mortgage woes push new foreclosures to a record high

But that’s yesterday’s news! As I was searching the LA Times web site to find this article, I came across a brand-new article from today’s edition:

Foreclosure notices set record again

It seems that the percentage of homeowners who have received a Notice of Default hit an all-time high in the April-June quarter, rising to 0.65%. Now, that’s just Notices of Default, only a fraction of those (10-20%) will actually end up getting foreclosed on. Even so, it does point to a lot of foreclosures going on.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel, our local rag, has also been chock full o’ foreclosure news, although the most recent article I could find is this one:

No relief for foreclosure wave

Just do a search anywhere – I like using news.google.com – and you will find all kinds of alarming information about foreclosures. Don’t be alarmed, though – it’s all part of the cycle of boom and bust. We’re making our way down towards the bottom of the cycle. In another year or two, we should reach bottom (“they” are saying it will come in 2009) and then we’ll begin working our way back up to the top of the cycle, and, weeee! We’ll do it all over again.

The good news is that the foreclosure boom is creating a lot of opportunities for folks who are interested in investing in real estate that really haven’t existed for a long time locally. After all, the time to buy, really, is when everyone is selling, and the time to sell will be in a few years, when everyone will be buying again.

In the meanwhile, if you have questions about how you can take advantage of this down market, contact me. After my two days of intense training, I don’t feel shy about calling myself the Foreclosure Specialist.