Minnesota Real Estate Investors Association, Inc.

Ok, so it’s been a while since I have been able to post any updates to the blog.  This spring we were busy buying, selling and rehabbing houses.  Plus I spent a lot of time building and improving our website and member management and event registrations system call PROS – Professional REIA Operating System for REIA’s (Real Estate Investors Association).  And now we are spending our time creating new marketing campaigns and chasing down anything that might smell like a lead.

So what’s going on in the markets right now?  There are several issues we are dealing with lately.  Most recently, Interest rates have started to climb and there is a huge lack of inventory.  The lack of inventory can be explained by the rise of hedge funds buying billions of dollars worth of inventory directly off the market and from the banks, pulling most of the Shadow Inventory, out of the shadows. 

That is one of the primary reasons for the lack of inventory, but not the only one.  The banks stopped filing foreclosures, or at least slowed way down last year to deal with other issues, including packaging up shadow inventory for the hedge funds.  The banks are back on track now, but all that inventory that would have been hitting the market right now, is just now going through the foreclosure process and is expected to hit the markets later this year.

I have been hearing from fairly reliable sources, that the amount of expected foreclosures over the next few years is equal to the amount of foreclosures that have already happened over the past few years.  It should be an interesting next few years.

Only mere hours ago we all saw live the Dow drop near 1,000 points in a startling amount of time. As I’m writing this the market has “recovered” but such volatility will not leave the minds of those who have their savings and IRAs in a stock portfolio that is certainly showing more red than they are accustomed to. To think that such a small country like Greece can trigger such waves because of the liquidity has compromised the integrity of the stock market and the following stories, finger pointing and possible domino effect that may be looming will leave these investors looking for a safe haven.

Suddenly the idea of investing into private money secured by real estate is looking a lot better
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We know that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 otherwise known as the $700 Billion dollar bailout bill was never intended to buy up the defaulted loans that the banks are holding onto, right?  And we also know that the bailout bill has increased to several trillion dollars, that’s Trillion with a “T”.  But what about the bad loans on the banks books, wasn’t that the purpose of the bailout bill in the first place?  Well yes, originally it was.  Do you remember the original 3 page bailout bill that President George Bush proposed, but was voted down?  The finally bailout bill that was passed one week later was 450 pages long and they must have excluded the 3 original pages which was supposed to direct the bailout to buy up all those bad notes that the banks were holding.

It boggles the mind to see what is happening with all that money that we the tax payer is going to have to pay for, for many generations to come.  There is a few extremely large banks getting the money, but they aren’t even using it to cover the bad debt that they have on the books, they are using it to buy other banks with very little bad debt.  Basically what we are doing with the money right now is giving it to the biggest financial institutions and telling them to use that money to buy smaller companies that weren’t reckl
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