Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Associated Press reported yesterday that JPMorgan Chase has stopped foreclosures so that it will have the time to review loan documents for errors. Another major lender, GMAC Mortgage had done the same about ten days ago.

Less houses for sale from banks and lending institutions.

There is a growing percentage of litigations following foreclosures that often leverage on the fact that the bank doesn’t have adequate documentation to bring the cause forward and therefore it is stalled in court for quite some time.
Halting the foreclosure process before it gets to court will help these two companies in straightening out their paperwork and will generally slow the foreclosure flow, so there will be less foreclosed houses on the market and this will improve a bit prices that already seem to be increasing in some areas.
Banks and lending institutions are getting very active also in other areas: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are reported to have launched a project to unload 150,000 foreclosed properties: there will be low down payments and no requirement for mortgage insurance and $ 30,000 will be added to the mortgage for renovations.
Individual buyers will have a 15 day chance of submitting offers before investors can step in and Fannie and Freddie will also go the extra mile of repairing themselves any major areas, like the roof, the plumbing and electrical works. Also other banks are doing this: brokers and investors have turned into contractors and REO properties are sometimes repaired directly by the bank so to be able to then market them directly to home buyers at the best price the market can offer.

Roberto Mazzoni

You can’t win unless you play on both sides. This is what the Internet has taught us in the recent years. Those companies that have totally neglected the Web as a production and promotion tool have lost lot of ground or have disappeared completely. Many companies that were just active online have disappeared as well. Internet by itself is not enough, it has to be combined with some traditional (offline) product, place or channel, then it can become very powerful.

Me and the legendary Lou Brown during the event in Atlanta.

Today I have been full time listening to the various presentations at the bootcamp on bank owned properties organized in Atlanta by Sam Bell and Mark Jackson. Lot of very technical stuff, which is very relevant if you want to achieve a good level of promotion on Google, but that would be useless if one didn’t have knowledge about traditional real estate evaluation and contracts. So I appreciated the fact that the presentations of today followed a whole series of lessons that yesterday were delivered on property evaluation (Mark Jackson), on closing procedures (Michelle Spalding) and on creating the most advanced type of real estate contract (Lou Brown): the land trust (which is used both to hide the owners of a property and for transferring interest in a property without a formal deed).

Dutch Mendenhall "bringing me to new heights"

Real estate is a field where you can observe the effective merge of the old culture of negotiation, evaluation and paperwork writing, with the newest Internet Marketing techniques that can bring you new buyers and sellers with less effort and more effectiveness. Yet you still see many investors fumbling with technology and shying away from it, or you see some young nerd who knows everything about setting up a blog and getting it ranked on Google, but knows nothing about buying and selling houses and yet wants to become a full time investor.

Read the rest of this entry »