Press Release: Sell Your House in DC FAST
Press Release: Sell your house in DC FAST
For_Immediate_Release:
United States of America (Press Release) August 16, 2008 — A report prepared for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments states that “The United States is in the midst of the largest foreclosure crisis in recent times. The Washington DC region, which had been relatively unscathed by major foreclosure problems until late 2007, now has one of the fastest growing foreclosure rates in the nation. The impacts of foreclosure activity are widespread. Local counties and cities experience a loss in property tax revenue and an increase in costs associated with foreclosures. Neighborhoods suffer as foreclosed properties often attract vandalism, crime and unhealthful conditions. Homeowners watch as their home values fall and those who need to sell often have to discount their properties substantially. Potential homebuyers are stymied by tight credit which often makes getting a home loan difficult.”*
The Esteban family has been investing in residential properties for over 25 years. Due to the record breaking amount of foreclosures in Washington, D.C., they have decided to expand the business and purchase homes in the Washington D.C. metro area.
“It was a business decision for us. There are many opportunities to purchase homes, make profits, and also help people that have the burden of a mortgage that they cannot afford”, says Reginald Esteban, President of Patriot Development, LLC. “A lot of people qualified for homes that they could not afford and are having a difficult time handling the mortgage payments.”
The current home office in the DC metro area is in the neighborhood of Petworth in northwest Washington D.C. Parties that are interested in selling their homes should go to http://www.patriotsbuyhouses.com/
* McClain, J. & Fowler, L. (2007). Foreclosures in the Washington DC Region: Evaluating the Scope of Crisis. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, Retrieved August 16, 2008 from http://www.mwcog.org/uploads/news-documents/CVxc20080618161259.pdf
How to Purchase Investment Property With No Money Down
Written by Reginald Esteban
Overview
The objective of this article is to provide an overview of how some real estate investors purchase homes “subject to” the existing mortgage. This is a strategy used by some investors to purchase homes with little or no money down at closing. This is a strategy used to attempt to increase cash flow.
Scope
This article is not meant to provide consultative and/or legal advice on real estate law, investing, and taxes. This article provides no guarantees for investment income. If a new real estate investor has no money, how can he or she purchase investment property with little or no money down? A real estate investor may find a home owner who is highly motivated to sell (e.g. avoiding bankruptcy) and is willing to sell the property significantly under market value.
An example of this scenario is when a home owner has little or no equity in the home, or is motivated enough to sell the home for less than the current market value, This strategy does not apply to homes that have a negative amount of equity.
In this scenario, the home owner and the real estate investor go through the appropriate closing attorney and sign a contract to sell the home to the buyer. The real estate investor agrees to make payments on the existing mortgage in return for the seller transferring the deed to the buyer. The existing mortgage is NOT assumed under the name of the real estate investor. The mortgage is kept in the seller’s name. This scenario is known as a “subject to” purchase. This means that the buyer purchased the home “subject to” the terms of the existing mortgage.
Since the real estate investor is now responsible for making mortgage payments, one strategy is to have a renter ready for the property soon after closing. When a qualified renter is in the property, the real estate investor relies on income from the renter to make the mortgage payments. The risk to the real estate investor is that the renter may not make payments, and the investor will still be responsible for making payments.
What are some of the possible benefits of purchasing a home “subject to”?
The buyer may find a scenario in which he or she does not have to put down a substantial amount of cash to purchase the home and does not have to seek financing from a mortgage lender to pay for the balance of the existing mortgage. He or she is required to pay for the existing mortgage month to month (e.g. in a 30 year fixed scenario). Since the loan is NOT assumed by the buyer, the real estate investor does not have to qualify for the loan.
The buyer still gains the benefit of tax write offs on interest payments because he or she is making the mortgage payments. The payment information is held and filed by the real estate investor.
How can I find these deals?
Successful real estate investors spend a substantial amount of time finding motivated sellers. Some common ways to try to find motivated sellers are as follows:
• Purchasing mailing lists and sending sales copy to home owners
• Purchasing ads in local news papers
• Posting signs in neighborhoods (e.g. We Buy Houses)
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Want to sell your home? Sign up online for an offer in 3 days from Patriot Development, LLC… Sell House DC Serving Washington D.C., MD, and VA. |
How to Protect your Real Estate customer list from Internet Hackers
Are there competitors that would target your real estate buyer’s list to steal all your customers?
Do you know of competitors that are trying to learn your corporate strategies?
Would a competitor benefit from reading your email messages?
If you are concerned about these issues, then read on…
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to give a brief overview of how to protect your buyer’s list from unauthorized intruders. This article does not provide a comprehensive security strategy for mitigating information security risks.
What are some of the main targets of your competitor?
Real estate investors often store lists of customer data in customer relationship management (CRM) and email systems. In this article, we will use an “auto responder” website as an example of a CRM. For the email system, we will refer to the accessing method as the “email account”.
Investors frequently maintain real estate customer lists to cultivate and maintain relationships with their buyers so that they can sell houses and other products to the buyers. The customer’s information is stored in a database with data such as the customer’s name, phone number, email address, and buying tendencies.
A motivated competitor with an incentive may attempt to hack into your email system to learn more about your investing strategies. A hacker that has knowledge of website vulnerabilities could attack your auto responder website and extract or delete your customer buyer list.
How to protect your passwords from malicious users
For both of these sites, a common way of hacking into an account is by guessing usernames and passwords. When a competitor finds your email address, he or she can go to your email website and attempt to guess the password. There are automated tools on the Internet that can guess passwords by attempting to login using hundreds of passwords per hour. These “brute force” password hacking programs can use dictionaries and randomly generated passwords. When the right password is found, the tool saves the result for the attacker. Additionally, there are ways to disguise or “spoof” the location of where the attacks are really coming from. Therefore, having an administrator track down an offending system may result in chasing a computer a foreign country.
Some websites will lock the account after a certain amount of invalid attempts are made. Some other sites will not. Make sure that your website locks your account after 3 invalid login attempts. Also ensure that the website has a way of verifying your identity when you attempt to get the password unlocked. When using passwords, the password should be at least 8 characters long, with a combination of 1 upper case, 1 numeric character, and 1 special character in addition to lower case characters. Ensure that the email or auto responding service allows special characters for passwords. Do NOT use passwords that are dictionary words, trivial number sequences (e.g. 1234), or passwords that are equal to the username.
A common way of stealing passwords from people is through social engineering. For example, a hacker may target one of your employees and attempt to pressure or trick them into giving up their password. An example of this would be a malicious hacker posing as a technical support employee at the auto responder website. The hacker may say that he noticed that your company is having technical difficulties and they need to check your account. If the employee resists, the hacker usually has some way of pressuring or tricking the employee, such as, “We are about to lose your real estate buyer’s list. We need your password NOW.” Security awareness training is the best way to prevent this from happening. Instruct your employees to never give out their password on the phone. These principles should also be applied to a user’s email account. Another way of preventing compromises through social engineering is by restricting access to sensitive data for those employees who do not have a valid business requirement for using the data. If the employee does not use the data, then do not give them access to it in the first place.
Another way that your password can be compromised is if the Internet connection is not encrypted. Your password can be compromised while it is being transmitted to the email system right after you type it in and hit enter through the browser. One way to help mitigate this risk is by making sure the system used an encrypted session. When you first connect to the system, ensure that the web address in Microsoft Internet Explorer starts with “https:”. The “s” shows that the system connection is encrypted and will make it harder for malicious users to compromise your password while in transit. Additionally, in Internet Explorer (version 7), you will see a small yellow pad lock icon to the right of the web address. This also indicates that the session is encrypted. Some email websites such as www.hotmail.com have an option to turn on encryption. For example, go to www.hotmail.com and click on “Use enhanced security”. This will enable encryption.
Mitigating physical security threats
Another way to lose your buyer’s list or sensitive emails is to have your laptop stolen. This is not uncommon and many times the data on the laptop is more valuable than the laptop itself. One way to manage the risks of having your laptop stolen is to encrypt the hard drive. When the thieves steal the laptop, the data will be irrecoverable without the proper authentication information. This is in contrast to some unencrypted laptops, where the username and password prompt can be bypassed and the data can be retrieved if the thief has the laptop in physical possession. One encryption product to consider is PointSec® from CheckPoint. PointSec® is in compliance with the US government encryption standard known as FIPS 140-2. This encryption can also be applied to USB thumb drives.
Conclusion
As real estate investors, spending many hours buying and selling houses can result in building many customer relationships. Protecting your customer information is a vital part of your company’s success and should not be overlooked.
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Forum Post: LANDLORDS.. protect yourself from this scam.
A real estate scam for ripping off landlords.. This was posted on www.realestatewebmasters.com by Larry Jensen.
07-30-2008, 08:15 PM
NY RE Broker
Real Estate Web Guru
Location: LaGrangeville, NY
Latest Real Estate Scam
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I am sure I saw this on these boards first, but here it is in my home town now.:
Quote:
There’s no end of real estate scams!
Posted July 30, 2008
Here’s the latest true happening in Westchester: Bogus renters view vacant properties and manage to leave the back door open. They then actually advertise the properties on Craig’s list as brokers, offer access through back door, and attempt to secure first and last month’s rent from unsuspecting potential renters. The police have been notified. In the meantime, it would be wise to double check the security of properties after you show them.
__________________
Larry Jensen, Principal Broker
St. Lawrence Properties, llc
www.StLawrenceProperties.net
Forum Post: A marketing survey.. how do you get your leads?
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This survey was quite a hit on the Internet forums and it appears to be for real estate agents.. I found it on www.realestateforum.com. It is valuable information, however, I do question a couple of issues. 1) Was the survey only available on the Internet? 2) Why are signs not included? It is not uncommon for agents to put up “direction” signs for open house. I do give the author his recognition for putting a lot of effort into this survey. Take it for what it is worth.
07-09-2008, 11:49 PM
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Most popular marketing methods
Hi All,
Just been reviewing some of the stats from the survey of agents we have been doing and thought you may be interested in the following stats. This question was titled “What type of marketing do you do to get more prospects?” and could answer multiple questions: Internet marketing = 51.7% I was surprised by some elemets here. How about you? Is this what would be considered a commonality in your area? Would love your thoughts. Also test yourself against agents by completing the 2 minute survey at http://tinyurl.com/6en8qv Regards __________________
WANTED Agents around the globe to complete a survey. It covers what is going on in your market place now and will take less then 2 minutes. Go to http://tinyurl.com/6en8qv For your help we have organised one of the greatest selling real estate programs for you worth $47 for Free. Your help is greatly appreciated as it will help agents from all walks of life |
Forum Post: Getting started when you have no cash…
From www.biggerpockets.com. The response is from “Primo_Coach”, AKA Jason Hanson.
Author: chris71167
BiggerPockets Forum Newbie
Location: kansas city, MO Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2008 5:24 pm
Post subject: New, My story and need advice.
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im knew although i have been browsing for some time, ill give you a short history of myself before i explain what i would like to do, Im currently 22 and at the age of 21 i had saved approx 15k for my first home, I had read every investing/mortage/real estate book i could find, before i really started looking, threw family i was introduced to a very respected and succesful real estate broker who has several offices, so i thought it was wierd that he was wasting his time with such (small fish) but he helped me find a forclosure,i bought a 1800sqft house 3 bed 3 bath etc for 112k, it was the ugliest house in a super nice neighborhood.(the house next to me sold for 275, even thow it is much larger and newer) but i am about half done renovating it and am looking to buy another when i sell this one, my question is i currently have 40k cash, should i save more maybe 60-90k before trying to tackle another, im looking to really get into this, and am hoping to find a higher end forclosure witch could yield more profit. what are your guys thoughts?
author: Primo_Coach
Moderator
Location: Oakton, VA Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 9:46 am
Post subject: Thoughts
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My thoughts are that you don’t want to use your own cash or own credit whenever possible.
Buy Wendy Patton’s book on subject-to and lease options.
If you have to wait to save up a large chunk of change every time you want to buy a house, it will take you a long time to make a lot of money.
You need to learn creative financing so you can buy dozens of houses a year.
Forum Post: How should I sell properties via the newspaper?
I scower the Internet every day for new content and fresh posts from knowledgeable people in the home buying industry. When I find interesting messages, I will post them here on my blog. Below is a post and response from www.biggerpockets.com.
from: tylerwicks
Location: Bothell, WA
Posted: 29 Jul 2008 21:38
Post subject: Newspaper ads?
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Has anyone used newspaper ads to sell retail properties?
If so did you target the main papers (In my case, Seattle Times etc.) or the classifieds oriented (Nickel Nic etc.)?
Thanks!
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from: msedwick
Moderator
Posted: 30 Jul 2008 12:52
Post subject:
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The bigger papers also charge more because they have higher circulation. So, it depends on your budget. You could place an ad in the Times/PI on Sunday only. Track the calls and see if you get any leads. Also, place adds in the lesser papers like the Little Nickel or the smaller local papers (Eastside Journal). If the house is north then run ads in the Everett Herald. Also, run ads free on Craigslist and Backpage.com. Signs in the yard with flyers and directionals at the corners, just like the realtors do it. The more marketing you can do the better. If you are willing to pay comissions but don’t want to list it, then send flyers to the local real estate offices saying you are a FSBO but will pay the selling agents commission. Hold Open Houses. Good luck, hope you sell it! Mike
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Mike Sedwick
Urban Pioneer Services
“Investing with honor, for a mutually fair profit”
