A few years ago I was on a mission to find that perfect foreclosed home that you could fix up and flip. A lot of the home's that I was finding as I was scouring Utah County looked just like this home pictured above. I would systematically find the home, look at the county records for age, square footage and size of the lot. I would then have a friend of mine pull comparable sales for me to see what it would go for once it was rehabbed. I would then formulate a ridiculously low ball offer that would have allowed me to hit a home run on every house. Needless to say I never connected on any of those pitches or offers as they were.
Today the foreclosure landscape in Utah has changed dramatically. You can now find beautiful homes that may have been in the parade of homes just a few years back on the auction block. I had lunch with an investor a few weeks ago that purchased and sold over 100 homes in 2009 at auction. I picked his brain on how he did it. What he looked for in every house, and what he found? His answers were almost comical as he expounded on his experiences with buying home's often times site unseen.
He said he still gets a little bit of Adrenalin running through his body when he enters the house he just purchased for the first time. Will it be a meth house? Will it be infested with mice? Will it be a horrible floor plan that no one will ever want to live in? Will it be a gem only needing new carpet and a coat of paint? More often then not he told me he is on the phone with his contractors as he is walking through the home for the first time lining up the dumpsters to be delivered so they can start the wonderful task of stripping the home down to the bare floors.
One can imagine the feeling of victory when you walk inside a home that is only a weeks worth of work away from being ready to list. On the other hand I can only imagine the feeling of walking into a home I just purchased and knowing that it is 3 months and $100,000 away from being ready to list. I guess in that business you win some and you lose some, the key is to win more then you lose.
An article just published in the Salt Lake Tribune outlines how hard Utah has been hit by this latest wave of foreclosures. It gives some pretty amazing statistics on how our foreclosure filings have increased by over 100% in Utah in the last year. Click on this foreclosure link to read the full article.
If you are interested in buying foreclosed homes in Utah, rehabbing them and selling them for a profit then you should definitely get in touch with someone who has experience in doing it. There are so many pitfalls to watch out for as well as unwritten rules at the court house auctions that you should learn before you ever take the plunge. From reading the SL Trib article it sounds like we are going to have plenty of homes to bid on over the next 12 months. Thats good news for investors as it will allow you to be more choosy in the homes you bid on and the amounts you are willing to pay for them.
I am going to be working on a free report dealing with buying bank owned homes both at auction and as REO's. Email me if you are interested in a copy of the report and I will be more then happy to send one out to you. If you have had experiences good or bad with buying foreclosed properties and wouldn't mind sharing what you have found leave us a comment at the bottom of this post..
All the best,
Stetson Lowe - www.utahloantips.com- stetsonlowe@gmail.com
