I would think the first check would be the unemployment rate for the county involved. That normally tells you all you need to know about the property. If there are no jobs, there is no rent to be had.

– Badtux the Worked-the-numbers Penguin
.-= last blog ..Wednesday morning guitar music =-.

The big blocks of houses sound like failed subdivisions which are often in various levels of completion. The key would be the number of bathrooms. If there is only one in a house with multiple bedrooms, it is an older house that might be well built, but it isn’t marketable these days. Another possibility is a blighted neighborhood.

Actually, the best deals are tax sales, but you have to be their to bid, and have the cash ready.

It just occurred to me that another problem with foreclosures in the US, is that there may be other liens on the property that won’t show up for a while. Banks haven’t been very good about keeping track of the paperwork, and it is coming to light that the bank that forecloses may not actually hold the note on the property. You would need solid title insurance and a fund for attorney’s fees.

The whole thing is just too risky for anyone who is sane.

houses in my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods dropped by about 20-30% of their bubble prices and stayed there for awhile, but the speculators seem to be moving in now. this is about what happened last time prices crashed around here: they almost got low enough for real people to start buying homes to live in, but just before that happened the house flippers swooped in and snapped up all the affordable fixer uppers and resold them at unaffordable prices.
.-= last blog ..My inner cryptobiologist lol’d at this one =-.

(sort by ‘Price’… duh!) 😉

I got curious and looked at ‘Melbourne, FL’ 😉 I was surprised to see a couple there under $20k, and several under $30k.
Brevard County Foreclosure Homes Results

Property ID: F1244543
Type: Foreclosure
Address: MONROE ST NE, Palm Bay, FL, 32905
BD/BH: 3 / 2
Price: $18,000.00

Have to register to see the details though.

This is appropriate for your graphic at the top of this thread: 😉

I see that PRwatch are not impressed (nor should anyone be) about Obama’s latest *tough* rhetoric:

Tough Talk Is Not Enough on Loan Modifications

BTW, I came across PRwatch looking for a story published in AFR (Australian Financial Review) here (which requires registration to read, and I have enough spam thank you). One of our big companies got caught being very naughty (well, downright unethical. SOP of course, so, a normal corp!)

Another Brick in Boral’s Wall
There’s a link to the ABC story with a little more detail in that article if anyone’s interested.

At least the regulator’s here will do something when the crap Corp’s pull every day becomes blatantly obvious to blind Freddy! Seems that in the USA, even if a Corp admits they are evil bastards, either nothing will happen or they get a fat Gov reward! 😈

Bah! Humbug!! Indeed.

I was curious about the ‘US company thing’. Might have to ask LadyMin about that. I know Delaware have some nice reasons to minimise tax registering there (I was considering registering a company via a Delaware Management company when I had a need to have a US bank acc’t and required a US company address. But the need evaporated. 🙂 When I was doing the research, the costs and ongoing management fees etc. were very reasonable.

Anyway, as I said, I wouldn’t get involved without a LOT of very serious research. If it works for the people doing it now, good luck to them! 😀 *shrug*

I did do a quick ‘Google* for foreclosures in Kansas (which was used for the examples in the story). One site had foreclosed houses for sale in Kansas City starting at US$15,500:

Kansas Foreclosure Homes for Sale

Wyandotte County, KS
3 Bd | 1 Ba | $15,500.00

Another site ‘RealtyTrac’, has foreclosures in Ellis County (Antonino) starting at US$11,000!

RealtyTrack – KS Forclosures

There appears to be some 8 real estate companies specialising in foreclosed properties in Ellis County alone with over 67,000 properties listed!

There were a few interesting stat’s there (for Kansas):
Foreclosures Sold: 66,511
Down, Sep 2008: -25,998 vs Sep 2009: -28.10%

New Foreclosures: 332,292
Down, Sep 2009: -11,346 vs. Oct 2009: -3.30%

Foreclosure avg. Sales Price: $203,851
Oct 2008 vs Oct 2009: $3,032, up 1.50%

So, there are definitely very cheap properties. Whether they are any good or not… *shrug* 🙂 (also, the company selling the deal here says that the properties they sell are all *renovated*, whatever that means!) 😛 😆

Regarding property management fees, when I investigated renting the house out I was looking at a *minimum* of 10%. And that’s a minimum, with a property manager that I knew. He took one stroll around the neighborhood, guessed in his head what the house could rent at, asked me what my monthly mortage+tax+insurance payment was, told me what he thought he could rent it at (which was much lower) and what his minium fees would be and said “Sell it.” And he would have been making money off the deal, but he wasn’t interested in watching me go underwater further (an honest man, imagine that!).

The setup described above is a scam, a classical Ponzi scheme, pure and simple. There’s no friggin’ way the numbers work.
.-= last blog ..Tighty righties want to sell guns to terrorists =-.

The numbers are bogus. I assume “rates” is what we call property taxes. The property taxes on a building lot in mostly rural Santa Rosa county on the Florida Panhandle were $250/year. Property insurance is totally dependent on your postal code, but I don’t know anyone who is below $100/month. If the $60/month fee is real, that is an unbelievably low price.

I don’t understand why they want people to set up a US company. Canadians own houses and condos all along the coast, as do Germans, so there is no problem with foreign ownership. As a rental property there may be other taxes that will apply at the local, state, and Federal level for any income from the property. This sounds fishy from the get go. The pricing is just too low, and the expected rents too high.