After the housing crisis home flippers cash in on foreclosures
After the housing crisis, real estate wholesalers are finding investors for foreclosures and distressed homes, who fix them up. But are low-income buyers shut out?
Leaves blew past an empty home last fall in a Detroit neighborhood. The house was listed on an auction block of foreclosures during the housing crisis.
Rebecca Cook/Reuters/File
In a post-recession America rife with foreclosures and upside-down mortgages left over from the housing crisis, many cities and towns are stuck with houses so run-down they’re almost uninhabitable. In some neighborhoods, they blight entire blocks. Some cities have begun to bulldoze them, but here’s another option:
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A friendly man answers the phone number listed on a Craigslist posting promising a fast sale. He explains that after just a 10- or 15-minute inspection, he’ll be able to get you cash for your house – no matter the condition – in only a few days. No, he’s not a broker. He’s a real estate wholesaler who quickly flips homes to a new buyer, usually an investor, for a profit ranging from a couple of thousand dollars to $10,000.
Real estate wholesaling is a relatively obscure practice that offers mixed benefits to communities. On the one hand, it quickly puts distressed or dilapidated properties into the hands of people who fix them up to sell or rent. On the other hand, wholesalers’ markup can make it harder for lower-income families and
affordable-housing groups to buy homes.
While no one tracks the extent of wholesaling, one thing is clear: Where once wholesalers had to post ads on telephone poles and billboards to find willing sellers, the housing market is now glutted with distressed homes. March alone saw nearly 370,000 foreclosure notices on properties, the highest monthly total since online foreclosure marketplace RealtyTrac began tracking them in January 2005. That backlog has spawned a surge in buying activity in some real estate markets.
“It’s a feeding frenzy right now,” says Shawn Jardine, a real estate agent in Colorado Springs, Colo., who lists properties for a major bank in addition to renovating and flipping homes herself. “On one property listed for $65,000, I had 15 offers. The best offer won at $20,000 over asking price.”
In short, investors are returning to the real estate market: Seventeen percent of those looking to purchase a home will buy an investment property, according to a survey by Move Inc., a real estate website that lists rentals and new homes. That’s more than three times the share of home buyers who were looking to buy an investment property a year ago.
And they’re snapping up distressed properties, many times with all-cash offers, because foreclosed homes sell at a discount – typically about 15 percent less than comparable homes not in foreclosure, the National Association of Realtors reports. That discount, which can be even larger if the wholesaler buys directly from a cash-strapped homeowner, is one reason that wholesalers can turn a profit and still sell homes that attract other investors.
Wholesalers work fast
The process is straightforward: The wholesaler flips homes so quickly that he doesn’t actually take possession of the title. Instead he enters into a contract with the home’s owner and then signs it over to a new buyer within days for an “assigning fee” – his profit.
