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Buying out of Foreclosure

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Foreclosure Auction Signs by Niall KennedyUS News & World Report quoted me in How to Buy a Foreclosed Home. It opens, 

AS HOME PRICES SOAR IN many cities, buyers may look to foreclosures to land bargains on houses. Foreclosure happens when a borrower can no longer make mortgage payments, and the lender seizes and then sells the home to recover losses.

Foreclosed homes are often sold for less than their market value.

That discount could bring a home within reach, but the financing and the home’s condition could present challenges. Before you bid on a foreclosed home, make sure you know the risks and the limitations.

Is It A Good Idea To Buy A Foreclosure Home?

Buying a foreclosure can save you some cash, but it comes with risks. If you pursue a foreclosure, it helps to have a “stomach of steel,” says David Reiss, law professor and research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School.

Expect a lot more ups and downs than the typical homebuying process, says b, whose work focuses on real estate finance and community development.

Homebuying, including financing, can be more complicated with a foreclosed home. Yet the lure of savings can be irresistible.

“It can be like a 15% discount on your neighboring houses,” Reiss says. “So, it can be significant.”

But your savings will depend on the local real estate market and the condition of the foreclosed home, says Vince Malta, a San Francisco Realtor and president of the National Association of Realtors. Properties that need a lot of work sell for less than market value because of their condition and lower demand.

Not every foreclosure is a “steal” or a very good deal, Malta says.

“The truth is, the bank doesn’t want to ‘give’ the house away or sell it for less than it’s worth,” he says. “Foreclosures generally sell for very close to the appraised value.”

How Do You Buy a Foreclosed Home?

Buyers can find foreclosures at auctions, on home search sites such as Zillow and from traditional real estate agents, to name a few sources. You can finance or use cash to pay for a foreclosed home, but the former can be tricky.

Will you need cash to buy a foreclosure? You don’t necessarily need a full cash payment, but when you think you might buy at auction, you should prepare. Have some cash ready to make an immediate down payment.

Ask the auctioneer how much you might need in cash and how long you have to pay in full. Many foreclosures close within 30 to 45 days.

If you plan to finance the foreclosure, you will want to obtain a preapproval from a mortgage lender before the auction and bring it with you.

If you’re buying a bank-owned foreclosure at auction, you might want to apply for a loan from the same bank to simplify matters. Just be sure the bank offers a competitive interest rate.

If you’re buying a foreclosure from a bank, you could get a loan from the same bank to make your purchase. It’s not required but could make the process easier. Still, be sure the bank offers a competitive interest rate, as even a slightly higher rate could cost you thousands over the life of the loan.

Fair warning: Some banks will not want to finance foreclosures or will require large down payments because they can be risky investments.

Government-backed loan programs from the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Federal Housing Administration may offer financing options, but the property will need to meet standards for approval. Fannie Mae’s HomePath program helps homebuyers purchase properties the government-sponsored mortgage buyer has foreclosed on, Reiss says.

The program provides up to 3% in closing cost assistance for buyers who complete a homeowner education course.

“I have seen Fannie Mae put a lot of money into properties to get them in the condition for an owner-occupant to purchase them,” Malta says. “But I’ve also seen properties that would only accept cash offers due to the overwhelming deferred maintenance and damage to the property.”

An FHA 203(k) loan could be another smart choice for foreclosures in disrepair. The 203(k) program allows borrowers to finance repairs and renovations into the mortgage.

What Are the Risks of Buying a Foreclosure?

Buyers can embrace the process with eyes wide open, knowing the risks involved. The biggest risks can stem from buying property sight unseen.

“The big, scary thing is that with a number of foreclosures, you can’t actually inspect the property before you actually bid,” Reiss says. “That’s in part why the prices are below the market.”

Even if you pay for a home inspection, you typically have to buy the foreclosure “as is.” This means that if you purchase the home, any problem that pops up and the cost of fixing it are yours.

You can end up with a lot more of these problems in a foreclosed home, depending on the circumstances. A frustrated family might strip the home of valuable fixtures and appliances before leaving the house.

“Or they kind of just beat it up because they were angry about having to go through the foreclosure,” Reiss says.

A home lost to foreclosure could indicate a home neglected, Malta adds. “(You) have no idea what the previous owner has done for maintenance, or in many cases, hasn’t done,” he says.

How Can You Reduce the Risks of Buying a Foreclosure?

You can take a few steps to reduce the risks of buying a foreclosed property.

Get an inspection. “Buyers should absolutely hire their own inspector and thoroughly inspect the property,” Malta says.

In most instances, the bank will disclose any defects in the house, but sometimes the bank doesn’t have these details, he adds.

Research public property records. If you aren’t allowed to inspect the property, which may sometimes be the case, Reiss recommends researching its publicly available history. A property record search can reveal information about sales, tax liens, changes to square footage and additions to the property.

You can check the county tax office, which may have records available online.

“Maybe you’ll see some good news, like a boiler was replaced two years ago,” Reiss says. “Or maybe you’ll see some scary news, like there’s all these permits, and you don’t know if the work was completed.”

Do some informal due diligence. Start by visiting the house and performing a “curbside inspection” of your own, Reiss says.

“Even if you can’t go inside the house, you want to look at the property,” he says. “If you can peek in the windows, you probably want to peek in the windows.”

Knock on the doors of neighbors and see if they can answer your questions about the foreclosure. Tell them you want to bid on the home but need to learn all you can about the previous owners, including how long they lived in the house and how well they maintained it.

Ask if the home has had squatters or recent break-ins.

“Try to get all that information,” Reiss says. “Neighbors are probably going to have a good sense of a lot of that, and I think that kind of informal due diligence can be helpful.”

Contract Selling Is Back, Big-Time

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The Chicago Reader quoted me in The Infamous Practice of Contract Selling Is Back in Chicago. It reads, in part,

When Carolyn Smith saw a for sale sign go up on her block one evening in the fall of 2011, it felt serendipitous. The now 68-year-old was anxiously looking for a new place to live. The landlord of her four-unit apartment building in the city’s Austin neighborhood was in foreclosure and had stopped paying the water bill. That month, she and the other tenants had finally scraped together the money themselves to prevent a shutoff and were planning to withhold rent until the landlord paid them back. Exhausted with this process and tired of dealing with “slumlords,” Smith wanted to buy a home in the neighborhood to ensure that she, her mother, Gwendolyn, and their dog, Sugar Baby, would have a stable place to live. But due to a past bankruptcy, Smith thought she would never be able to get a mortgage. So when she saw a house on her street for sale with a sign that said “owner financing,” she was excited. The next morning, she called the number listed and learned that the down payment was just $900—a sum she could fathom paying. “I figured I was blessed,” she says.

Her good fortune continued. A man on the other end of the line told her she was the very first one to inquire. The seller, South Carolina-based National Asset Advisors, called her several more times and mailed her paperwork to sign. Smith says she never met in person with anyone from National Asset Advisors or Harbour Portfolio Advisors, the Texas-based company that owned the home. But she says the agents she spoke with assured her that her credit was good enough for the transaction, despite the past bankruptcy. Next, they gave her a key code that allowed her to go in and look at the house, explaining that she’d be purchasing it “as is.” Smith thought the two-flat looked like a fixer-upper—the door had been damaged in an apparent break-in, and there was no hot-water heater, furnace, or kitchen sink—but given her poor luck with apartments of late, she felt she couldn’t pass up the chance to own a home. Both she and her mother, now 84, had been renting their whole lives; after pulling together the down payment, they beamed with pride when, in December 2011, they received a letter from National Asset Advisors that read “Congratulations on your purchase of your new home!”

But within a year, Smith discovered that the house was in even worse shape than she’d realized. In her first months in her new home, Smith estimates that she spent more than $4,000 just to get the heat and running water working properly, drinking bottled water in the meantime. Then the chimney started to crumble. Smith would hear the periodic thud of stray bricks tumbling into the alleyway as she sat in her living room or lay in bed at night; she began to worry that a passerby would be hit in the head and soon spent another $2,000 to replace the chimney. Public records show that the house had sat vacant earlier that year, and the city had ordered its previous owners to make extensive repairs.

Had Smith approached a bank for a mortgage, she likely would’ve received a Federal Housing Administration-issued form advising her to get a home inspection before buying. But as far as she recalls, no one she spoke to ever suggested one, and in her rush to get out of her old apartment, she didn’t think to insist.

The documents Smith signed with Harbour and National Asset Advisors required her to bring the property into habitable condition within four months, and with all the unexpected expenses, she soon fell behind on her monthly payments of $545.

Smith’s retirement from her job as an adult educator at Malcolm X College, in the spring of 2013, compounded the financial strain. Living on a fixed income of what she estimates was around $1,100 a month in pension and social security payments, she fell further behind, and the stress mounted.

“When we got to be two months behind, they would call me every day,” she remembers.

National Asset Advisors also began sending her letters threatening to evict her. That’s when Smith had a heart-stopping realization: She hadn’t actually purchased her home at all. The document she had signed wasn’t a traditional mortgage, as she had believed, but a “contract for deed”—a type of seller-financed transaction under which buyers lack any equity in the property until they’ve paid for it in full. Since Smith didn’t actually have a deed to the house, or any of the rights typically afforded home owners, she and her mother could be thrown out without a foreclosure process, forfeiting the thousands of dollars they’d already spent to rehabilitate the home.

“I know people always say ‘buyer beware’ ” she acknowledges. “But I’d never had a mortgage before, and I feel like they took advantage of that.”

What felt like a private nightmare for Smith has been playing out nationwide in the wake of the housing market crash, as investment firms step in to fill a void left by banks, now focused on lending to wealthier borrowers with spotless credit histories. In a tight credit market, companies like Harbour, which has purchased roughly 7,000 homes nationwide since 2010, including at least 42 in Cook County, purport to offer another shot at home ownership for those who can’t get mortgages. Such practices are increasingly common in struggling cities hard hit by the housing crash. A February 2016 article in the New York Times titled “Market for Fixer-Uppers Traps Low-Income Buyers” examined Harbour’s contract-for-deed sales in Akron, Ohio, and Battle Creek, Michigan. The Detroit News has reported that in 2015 the number of homes sold through contract-for-deed agreements in the city exceeded those sold through traditional mortgages.

*     *     *

Contract-for-deed sales also offered an attractive loophole from the growing set of regulations on traditional mortgages following the financial crisis. “In the same way that you saw [subprime lenders like] Countrywide get really big in the late 1990s,” says David Reiss, research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School, “one of the real attractions for the businesses operating in this space is that they are underregulated.”

Finding An Affordable Neighborhood

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Trulia quoted me in How To Find An Affordable Neighborhood. It opens,

There’s more to consider when buying a house than the house itself. The neighborhood can be equally, if not more, important. You might already have must-haves in mind for the type of property you’ll buy — at least two bathrooms to stay sane, for example. Now you need to focus on finding the best neighborhood that fits your budget. Read on for some tips, techniques, and practices to help you find affordable neighborhoods, whether you’re looking at homes for sale in Seattle, WA, or anywhere else across the country.

1. Use the Affordability layer in Trulia Maps

The most important factor when looking for an affordable home is price. No surprise there. But the listing price doesn’t tell you the full story. The seller could have simply picked a number because that’s what they’d like to get, a price that might have nothing to do with reality.

Use the Affordability layer in Trulia Maps to compare listing prices with recent sales prices. Just scroll over your neighborhood of interest to see the median listing price, change your filter, and then scroll over the same area to see the median sales price. There may be a huge price difference between the two, which besides a too-optimistic seller could also reflect a softening market. A once-unaffordable neighborhood, based on listing prices alone, might now be in reach once you see what homes are actually selling for.

Also look at the sales price per square foot, a real eye-opener. You can see exactly how much location affects a home’s price. “If using a price-per-square-foot comparison, the homebuyer must be sure to compare similar-sized properties or allow for the different results based upon the differences in size,” says Greg Stephens, chief appraiser for Metro-West Appraisal Co. in Detroit, MI.

2. Explore other neighborhoods

If you already have a neighborhood in mind, take some time to look at the bordering neighborhoods as well. You might find more affordable options that have the same benefits. “As home prices increase within desirable areas, generally speaking, locations on the periphery become in demand,” suggests Michael Kelczewski, a Pennsylvania and Delaware real estate agent.

Pick your neighborhood of interest and note the listing and sales prices. Then pick a bordering neighborhood that costs less to buy into. Compare amenities in Trulia Maps, and you can see where the restaurants, grocery stores, nightclubs, cafes, stores, arts and entertainment areas, spas, and active-life spaces are located.

Don’t rule out up-and-coming neighborhoods. Yes, you’re taking a risk here. “Up-and-coming,” as a description, might turn out to be a tad too hopeful if the neighborhood is really going nowhere. How do you minimize the risk? Look for warning signs. “Distressed areas generally are identified by low sales volumes, elevated value decreases, and poor access to amenities,” says Kelczewski.

3. Look for fixer-uppers

If your heart is set on a neighborhood that lets you bike to work and raise urban chickens, you might not be able to get a dreamy, move-in-ready abode with all new upgrades. Instead, target fixer-uppers, or remodels, or teardowns. You might wish to consider a house with “good bones,” as they say, meaning there’s potential in there somewhere. If the house doesn’t even have that, a teardown might be in order.

You can often find fixer-uppers in the foreclosure arena. But beware. “Purchasing an REO/short sale or auction property when the asset is sold ‘as is’ necessitates a network of professionals to understand the condition and to project rehab costs,” offers Kelczewski. “Contractors, electricians, plumbers, even structural engineers may be required in order to adequately analyze a property.”

You’ll also need to devote some time, or sweat equity, to save money when you buy a fixer-upper. “It is important to have a sense of how much work would be needed to get the house in the shape you would want it to be. You would need to get estimates for the work — the final cost will probably be higher than the estimates — and try to determine how long it will take to get permits approved and contractors in the door … [and] it will probably take longer than everyone tells you,” says David Reiss, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, NY. “But when you are pulling your hair out because you are cooking dinner in a half-finished kitchen, remember all of the money that you saved when you bought.”

What Is a Probate Sale?

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Charles Dickens' Bleak House

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Realtor.com quoted me in What Is a Probate Sale? A Home You’ll Have to Win in Court. It opens,

If you’re looking to buy a home on the cheap, you might have stumbled across a probate sale. But what exactly is a probate sale? Basically it means that the homeowner died without a will bequeathing the house to an heir. In most cases, this means that an estate attorney or representative has to sell the property in order to liquidate the asset and distribute the money to family members—and that can spell a major bargain for you.

Probate sales can be attractive to buyers because they’re often priced below their market value, much like foreclosures. But since a court has to supervise and approve the home’s sale, the process is more complicated—and lengthier—than usual.

Here’s a look at the legal hoops you’ll have to jump through to make a probate sale happen.

How A Probate Sale Works

In a probate sale, the estate attorney or other representative hires a real estate agent to post the listing and sell the home. While buyers may be drawn in by the budget-friendly price, probate homes are not for everyone, starting with the fact that the homes are typically sold as is.

“Usually the estate doesn’t have an interest in renovating the property, either because of logistics, timing, or available funds,” says Richard Witt, owner of Long Island Cash Home Buyer. So, don’t expect the estate owners to make any repairs before you move in; what you see is what you get. That said, those in the know advise getting a home inspection just to make sure there aren’t major problems that would deter you from moving forward.

Here’s another difference with probate sales: If you decide to make an offer, that must be accompanied by a deposit totaling 10% of the price of the home. That’s in addition to your down payment, although this deposit can be folded into your down payment if the deal goes through.

Once your offer is accepted by the estate’s representative, that’s not where the negotiations end. From there, the estate attorney has to petition the court to approve the sale. And as you might expect, courts move at their own pace; expect to wait 30 to 45 days (or even longer) for your day in court when you can claim your home.

Playing the waiting game isn’t the only frustrating aspect of probate sales. In certain states, even as your offer is making its way through the courts, the home can remain listed and be open to other bidders who may be allowed to show up at your hearing and outbid your offer.

“In California, for instance, probate homes typically do go up for auction at the courthouse after the offer comes in,” says David Reiss, research director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School. “This builds a lot of uncertainty into the process for the bidder who gets the ball rolling in the first place.” All that said, you also have a right to counteroffer and, even if you do lose out, you should at least get your 10% deposit back. 

Dollar Homes

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Packmatt

Realtor.com quoted me in Buy a House for a Buck? The Real Story Behind $1 Listings. The story reads, in part,

Hidden deep within the bowels of real estate listings are a few head-scratchers that would no doubt catch any bargain hunter’s eye. They’re homes for sale for the grand total of one crisp American dollar. So what’s the deal? Are they for real?

I decided to find out by actually clicking, and calling, and learning the stories behind these tempting facades. And it turns out, $1 listings can mean many things. Here’s what this lowball price is actually all about.

*     *     *

Possibility No. 3: It truly is for sale for $1, but…

The next four places for $1 that I check out are all rundown properties in Detroit. They range in description from “fire damage sold as is” (translation: a charred pile of lumber—pic below) to “bungalow with three bedrooms, one bathroom, basement and much more” (translation: “more” means plywood for windows and doors).

Still, some houses sit on decent lot sizes of 3,000+ square feet in neighborhoods that seem habitable at first glance. The listing agent won’t return my call, but I track down an agent willing to show me the various rundown homes. Though back taxes or liens on the property may jack up the price, I ask whether the house will really sell for $1. “Sure,” he says. “This is Detroit.”

Now that I’ve found a true $1 listing, should I hand over a George Washington for one of these fixer-uppers?

“When a house is being sold for a dollar, it means that the local real estate market has cratered,” says David Reiss, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School who focuses on real estate issues and community development. “Land has no value. Or even worse, it has negative value and buyers of $1 homes will end up getting snookered. Owning land comes with various mandatory expenses like real property taxes. It’s possible the true value is even lower than a dollar. In that case, you will see a lot of $1 houses staying on the market, as hard as that is to believe.”

Reiss further explains how the Motor City’s market cratered so deeply: “Real estate’s value typically comes down to location. If jobs have disappeared, if residents have disappeared, if services have disappeared—then value disappears.”

Beyond having zero worth, a $1 home is likely a gaping money pit. When the New York Times ran a piece on the subject in 2007, it found that “the houses often require hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations.”

Though my search for $1 properties was a bust in the end, there once were $1 homes worth buying. “Think of New York City,” says Reiss. “Homes that were abandoned in the 1970s are now selling for seven figures.”

Bottom line? One-dollar listings may be a risky gamble, but, hey, you never know.