Fitch Ratings (a financial/credit market analysis firm) has released a very disturbing alert - and it’s one that I think you and I as real estate investors can almost certainly profit from.

This news concerns the “Delinquency Cure Rate”.  Here’s what that means:  If a person with a mortgage starts to get behind on their payment, that mortgage is described as “delinquent”.  Then if that person later brings all of their payments current before foreclosure, that loan is said to be “cured”.

Well, here’s the problem:  According to Fitch Ratings, the cure rate in the years of 2000-2006 was 45%.  This means that for that time period, nearly half of every home owner who fell behind in their payments ultimately got caught up.

But that number has changed dramatically. Presently, the default cure rate is 6.6% - this means that far less than 1 in 10 people who fall behind on their payments are able to bring their loan current and keep their property out of foreclosure.

This is a bad, bad statistics - it means that not only is our national foreclosure rate at historically horrible levels, but those people who fall into foreclosure seem to have a near zero probability of escaping that problem.

However, this appears to me to be an opportunity for savvy real estate investors.  One idea I have for capitalizing on the current environment featuring high foreclosure rates and low cure rates is to focus more on loan modifications.  Personally, I know very little about loan modifications, and I’m not really interested in learning everything about them…

…but I do think it’s worthwhile for us to have a way to profit from them, such as offering loan modification solutions to the foreclosure victims we encounter so regularly in our business.

What do you think?  What are some good ways to capitalize on the current market circumstances?  Share your thoughts with us in the comments area below!

As always, thank you for reading http://realestate.BryanEllis.com!

I’m sick of it.

I’ve just gotten yet another email from a real estate “guru” who never sends me anything but “invitations” to webinars and teleconferences.

Look, I’m all for webinars and teleconferences and even offer them myself sometimes. But geez! This guy, who is here in Atlanta, seems absolutely opposed to giving away any valuable content without delivering it through a teleconference and attaching a price tag to it.

So I made a radical decision: I looked through my e-mail to find the name of every real estate guru who has e-mailed me this week. And if I’ve not gotten at least one useful piece of information from them in that time period, I removed myself from their email list.

Enough is enough. It’s reasonable for these people to sell things to make money, but it’s nothing but purely disrespectful to you if that’s all they ever do. So here are the steps I recommend:

• Take a minute to go through your e-mail inbox for the past couple of weeks - it’s helpful to “sort” your inbox by the sender’s name
• For every email from a real estate “guru” - do a quick scan of the content they send you. Is any of it worthwhile or potentially worthwhile? If not, go to the end of any email from the guru and click the “unsubscribe” link.
• If the emails you receive from a particular guru are helpful or informative, send them a note or make a post on their blog thanking them for it - they’ll really appreciate it

Ok, my rant is over. Back to business

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