The new office will be staffed by Fase, as well as Tammi Warner, Senior Underwriter, who joined CW in February. Plans are to add additional staff to the team, including a junior originator, production analyst and underwriting analyst, in the coming weeks. This is the second California office opened by CW in the past 8 months. The firm acquired the assets of Sierra Capital Partners in July of 2009 and, in doing so, added 12 employees and an established lending team based in Irvine. With other recent hires, including the addition of loan officer and Vice President Thomas Meunier in November, the CW Agency lending platform now employs 115 professionals in 11 locations across the nation.

Here is the fun part you can gain from previous homeowner’s lost. Did you know? Because these houses where owned and repossessed they are being sold for basically what was owed on the mortgage. So whenever you hear of a Foreclose Auction go out and see you may just end up with a house for less than you think.

For a Caribbean property to be tailored for investment, there are two important principles which must be followed.

Firstly, setup costs must be minimized to allow investment opportunities to be a viable option to most investors. Also, the less your setup costs are in comparison to profit, the higher your return on investment will be.
Secondly, profit must be maximized. To maximize profit on your Caribbean property, there are several factors which must be given due care and consideration.
For example, many investors would require that their Caribbean property be fully managed to provide a healthy rental income. Therefore a management agency or company would ideally be setup to maximize rental occupancy, room rate charged and to fully manage the day-to-day running of the Caribbean property and surrounding land/site.

Via [Real Estate Weblog]

This is the first post on my new blog where I’m going to talk about how I became a real estate millionaire in only four years. I’m no Stanford or Harvard graduate with an MBA nor am I a professional realtor or accredited real estate investor. I’m just an ordinary guy who had a desire to own lots of real estate and create multiple streams of income so I don’t have to work the rest of my life.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and purchased my first property when I was 27 years old. Now San Francisco and the surrounding Silicon Valley is nowhere close to the cheap side for purchasing real estate. It was also a time when most people thought the market had already hit its peak and real estate prices were not going to go up much further. So when I started looking, the entry-level home price was around $400,000 to $450,000. Now I know you’re probably thinking “dang where’d you find a house at that low of a price”? Well, this was over five years ago and the housing market has since gone up.

At the time my current job was in San Mateo, California and the properties I was looking at in that price range pushed me all the way down to South San Jose. Now I’m not one for having to commute but I was dying to purchase my own house and the only way I could accomplish this was to do it in South San Jose.

After months of looking I finally found a house that had my name on it and I purchased it for $425,000 — back in 2002. Not only was this my first real estate investment — it just so happened to be my primary residence as well. From this point on I had an epiphany — all I could see were benefits in purchasing real estate.

Today I own several properties some in the United States and some internationally. The bottom line is they are all income producing cash flow positive assets that continue to build equity every single day. This blog is to help you understand how a normal Joe average with a basic college education can go from renting an apartment to owning several apartment buildings and vacation homes while he’s still under 35. I will also help explain the steps I took to get to where I am today in hopes you become just as (if not more) successful in real estate investing!

Via [Real Estate Blog]

Buyer’s Market?

by Kenneth Neal Sr.

“Experts say we are in a ‘buyers market’. Well, I’m here to tell you that we are WAY past the traditional buyers market. Foreclosures all time high, home value all time low, and overall homes on the market at records.”

Via [Realtor.com Blog]