Just back from 3 days in Cleveland - full report on the incredible, mind blowing Renegade Millionaire Summit in the May newsletter (The Mark Ijlal Factor) which as been sitting on my Desktop for a week now waiting for this.

But more importantly I had a chance to talk to several very very successful full time real estate investors from all across the nation who were there - we all agreed unanimously that the foreclosure crash is inevitable - big primary reasons being the ARM’s mortgages which will be impossible to refinance as interest rates creep up in the next 2-3 years.

Our group conclusion - do deals, accumulate a mountain of cash and get ready for the inevitable that is coming.

Are you still thinking about doing this? You are kidding? Right?

Technorati Tags: foreclosures,, michigan,, real estate investment

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is a list I just got via fax – over 140 bank owned foreclosures or REO’s – whatever you might like to call them. Big myth in the world of foreclosure investing is this – how can a “good deal” crawl its way out of Loss Mitigation, slide its way from likes of me and end up on MLS???

Lets check the cities on this band spanking new Michigan foreclosure listing:

Detroit
Waterford
Sterling Heights
Southfield,
Livonia
Hazel Park
West Bloomfield
Bloomfield
Birmingham
Shelby Township
Clinton Township
Harrison Township

The cheapest house is $2900 / 3 bedrooms – the most expensive is $579,000 / Bloomfield Hills colonial. Every price point from $10,000 to half a million is representated – for your pickings.

And this is JUST ONE LIST! From once source! And here the astonishing news:

None of these houses are on listed on MLS!

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Real Estate Apprentice 2005 - Laura Moody in front of her first Michigan foreclosure purchase.
Details as under: Purchased on April 1 for $65,000. Estimated rehab costs is $28,000. After repair value estimated to be $120,000. Timeline to complete is about 5 -6 weeks.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you intend to deal foreclosures in Michigan like I do - you will come across potential homeowners who are willing to buy your homes, you get very excited, send them to your team memeber loan officer and then the dreaded call comes in - Sorry, cant do them, they have a recent bankruptcy on their credit.

Oh, woe is me, you wail and try avoiding their phone calls as they frantically try to contact you to see if they can buy the house. Off course all of a sudden, you dont want to do anything with them and you avoid all contact with them.

Bad move Toto! Bankruptcy is not what it used to be. According to the authors of Two Income Trap - personal bankruptcies are up 900% in the last 10 years. Sooner or later you will run into one.

I have access to PACER database which is a direct linkup into the Federal Court system to see any records regarding bankruptcy. Last time I checked, 247 people were filing on an average bankruptcy in Southeastern Michigan - grand total 47,000 last year just in Southeastern Michigan according to Detroit News.

So here are two really good articles ; first one is the basics of bankruptcy:
12 Myths of Bankruptcy

Next one is even better and talks about how fast you can rebuild your credit after bankruptcy. Read it and I will show you tomorow how you can really niche yourself as a foreclosure expert in your area very quickly:

Rebuilding Credit After Bankruptcy

Technorati Tags: foreclosure, michigan, real estate,

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Personally I don’t think buying foreclosures in Michigan at the auction is a good strategy. Part of this comes from the 6 month redemption period in Michigan that pretty much puts whoever is living in foreclosed home at a great advantage over the investor.

Hey, they know that they don’t have to pay rent or mortgage for another 6 months – why not take advantage of it??? At that point their credit is pretty much gone anyway and they are past caring about their credit score so the typical “plea” that most Michigan investors are making in their long letters and postcards about them helping the homeowner saving their credit is not going to work anymore at this point in time.

I would not buy a house at a court house auction in Michigan unless and this is a big “unless” – I have already a deal with the homeowner that they will Quit Claim the house over to me before I go to the court house.

Well in that case, you might be wondering why even go to the court house with a cashier check – well some times, the homeowner calls in so late in the process – I have gotten calls literally hours before the Sheriff Sale that it is impossible to get a hold of the Loss Mitigation people who they can call the Attorney handling the file who then can call the county court house and stop the proceedings. You need at least 3 day to pull this off.

But what if you found a good deal – or better still you found a deal that looks horrible on paper, meaning NO EQUITY but you and me know about “Short Sales” so we don’t care about equity on paper, do we? If you got the CASHflow FAX yesterday and read the story then you know exactly what I am talking about.

But if you did found a good deal looking at the post auction listing that you just got from the court house? What would you do? You know most likely in almost 97% of the post auction foreclosures in Michgian – the homeowners are living in the house still and probably have no intentions of leaving the house anytime soon!

There are two factors that make this Michgian foreclosure listing attractive – first, we know that saving credit scores is most likely not a factor for the homeowners anymore. Second, the likelyhood of saving their homes are slim to none. Most people who can save the home by refinancing or selling it one of their realtives names would have probably done it by now if they could.

At this point only two things could happen – either they are trying to sell the home either with a realtor or For Sale By Owner ( I would suggest checking MLS if you have access or checking the forsalebyowner.com or fsbo.net or owners.com to see if the house is listed if you don’t want to drive by the property).

Or worse they have pretty much given up the idea of selling the house and just sitting there, pretending nothing is going on and waiting for eviction to happen. Either way, you can help them and I do mean “help” them. Because “you” – the real estate investor in Michigan – is the only hope they have right now to give them a fighting chance to start a new life.

How – read the next post about what YOU can do in Michigan post auction foreclosure listings tactics.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First of all lets define first what you are looking for in Michigan when you type Michigan Foreclosure Listings in a search engine or call a bank trying to find where can you get a printout for foreclosure listings in Michigan?

You may be looking for the pre-eviction foreclosure listing in Michigan - which in case your best bet is - Registrar of Deeds office in your local county. Pre-eviction means that the homeowners are still living in the house, they have interest in title, and the bank has not gone through with the eviction process.

Michigan is a judicial foreclosure state - meaning we are looking for a painful, drawn out 11 month cycle before the homeowners are actually asked to leave the foreclosed property.

Now off course another way of looking at this would be that it gives you 11 months to play the preforeclosure game in Michigan - a well thought out marketing campaign can make your phone ring like crazy with homeowners on the other end hoping to make a deal with investors like yourself.

The other advantage of 11 month pre-eviction foreclosure process is off course your ability to whack the bank via Short Sales. Which off course if you live in a non-judicial State like Florida or Georgia where eviction is only 30 days away from the date of Sheriff Sale or the court auction.

Now, apart from the crap that is being hyped on the forums and most of the home study courses available in the market - people who do Short Sales on a regular basis know that the actual “doing” of the Short Sale has gone from 2 weeks to almost 2 months in the last 2 years.

Nothing personal in that - just that banks are overwhelmed with the number for foreclosures coming there way. Michigan is one of the densely populated States and either #1 or #2 as far as home ownership is concerned. Lots of houses means lots of foreclosures. Such is the nature of this business.

So where to get this elusive Michigan Foreclosure Listings? No matter which county you live in Michigan - you have a court house, in that court house there is a Registrar of Deeds office, in that office is the treasure chest of the all the foreclosure listings you will ever want.

Now the interesting part of the Michigan Foreclosure Listings process is how much the foreclosure listings differ from county to county. My fellow Michigan real estate investors have to excuse me if I am using tri-county examples because I live, work and play in Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties. But here is what is interesting in these counties when it comes to differences in how you can get your hands in foreclosure listings:

Wayne county does not have a listing of anything before the “Auction” or Sheriff Sale at the court house. But you can go there in the downtown Detroit area, on top of Fishbones Restaurant (Note: their food is so superior to their branch in South field - try the New Orleans gumbo when you are there next time! Whoa!).

But you can specify the foreclosure listings by month - off course it makes a lots of profitable sense to ask for listings that are close to eviction. So if you count 6 months from Sheriff Sale I would probably get the last 4 months coming close to eviction. Your chances of striking a deal much much higher.

Here is some inside gossip from one of the top REO realtors in the Southeastern Michigan - some of big banks who have a huge number of foreclosures pending eviction in the city of Detroit are actually calling homeowners and asking them to leave in exchange of $1000 - $2000 cash.

Gee, I wondered which guy in their Loss Mitigation Department listened to my Preforeclosure CD’s. :-)

Oakland county has a totally different way of dealing with their foreclosure listings - they have pre-auction listings in Excel format. Actually they are pretty tech savvy. For a huge sum of $5 per week, they will actually e-mail you the listings in a spreadsheet which is great for mail merging, printing and doing all kind of things with foreclosures.

Macomb is pretty much like Wayne - although it has been time that I actually ventured in their offices - if anybody reading this is playing there and begs to differ, write a comment at this post and I will update this.

But in short - the pre-eviction foreclosure listing is dirt cheap, you can buy it fresh from the Registrar of Deeds for less than a cent per name - Oakland is $5 for around 26 pages every week with 25-30 names on each page. Lots of foreclosures - from $20,000 second mortgages to $2,000,000 luxury homes in Bloomfield Hills Michigan every single week.

Next : REO Michigan Foreclosure Listings - Where to find them for your hometown in Michigan?

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 10:12 PM | Permalink

Nothing is more misunderstood then in the world of Michigan real estate investing then the search for the foreclosure listings in Michigan or as is it called amongst the hard core real estate investors - “the list”.

Every body wants to get their hands on all the Michigan foreclosure listings that they can get - in their home town or some other area that they are interested in. My office gets calls all the time from out of State investors especially from high priced States like California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, New Jersey to name a few - real estate investors from those States looking for Michgian foreclosure listings.

But very few people ever get the whole story about the foreclosure listings and where to get them in Michigan and even few ever break the code to take those Michigan listings and actually make money with them.

I have written this post and some subsequent posts after receiving countless email and fax requests coming to my office, my personal email and personal requests - all looking for the elusive Michigan foreclosure list. I wrote this to answer and dispel many myths that surround the word - foreclosure listings and hoping that you will take the knowledge so freely shared that took a while to figure out myself and make money out of this.

But first a little introduction - there have been lots of new blog readers in the recent weeks (my email list is growing like crazy!) and I am an expert in buying and selling Michigan foreclosures.

My name is Mark Ijlal and I am a full time real estate investor in Southeastern Michigan. I buy and sell foreclosures - usually single family homes, 3-4 bedrooms in Southeastern Michigan. Sometimes, when I am bored, I would deal apartment complexes also. I, too searched for the Michgian foreclosure listings in my surrounding towns furtively for a good year when I started buying and selling foreclosures before I cracked the code behind the search for foreclosure listings.

Life is very interesting - happily married with 2 daughters, 35 years old, and living a life that is pretty much would have been impossible to even dream five years ago - all because of my understanding of how the world of bank foreclosures work.

I want you to take this knowledge that I so freely sharing with you and do something with it. Don't just print it and put it in a folder - read it, implement it, use it and put some new money in your bank account.

Next: Pre-Auction Michigan Foreclosure Listings - Where and How to get them by tomorrow?

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 07:48 PM | Permalink

I get emails all the time where somebody challenges me to convince them that Michigan preforeclosures are better than Michigan REO’s – I don’t have to convince anybody – they are both great for their own reasons or better still they are both just means to an end.

Who cares whether I made $100,000 in the March 2005 in preforeclosures, lease options or selling REO’s??? When I go to my bank they don’t ask me where the money came from? I mean if that is your concern then may be you need to change your bank! :-)

Opportunity comes in all shape, form and sizes – some deals will make you a tremendous amounts of money, some will make average money and once in a while a deal will break-even for reasons outside your control. Thing to remember is that the people who are making money doing Michigan Real Estate spend more time “doing” it then just “reading” about it.

Start today and try to do one deal – that is all you need to worry about. There is enough time in the world to become the Apartment Goddess of wherever you live or may be you want the Loss Mitigation Officers of all major banks tremble at the mere mention of your name because you have become Mr. Short Sale in North America.

But you still have to do your “FIRST” deal!

So don’t do what I did. Which was to waste precious time doing nothing when I started out! 90 days over already in 2005, before we know it I will be wishing you Happy Thanksgiving! Think about what you can do today to have some brand spanking new money in your bank account by June 2005???

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)