Geesh. Just a few weeks ago, there were lots of houses for sale in my area. I even made an offer on one but, being the amateur that I am, didn’t make the offer attractive enough for the bank. I had a few others that I was eyeing hoping they’d drop a bit in price so I could make the numbers work on one of them for a rental but now they’ve all dropped off the MLS. I changed the filters on my daily real estate search to include “pending” homes and there they all were. Wow. I don’t think I’ve seen that many houses sell so quickly in a long time. My first thought was, “Is the housing crisis over?” but then I realized it’s Spring and people seem to buy more houses in the Spring. I’m not giving up on my dream to buy a rental but I am taking this opportunity to just hunker down and save more cash so that I’ll be even more ready for the next great deal to come along. My goal is to have enough cash to put 50% down on the property to keep the payment as low as possible and improve the monthly cash flow. Most of the deals I’ve been looking at would give me about $300 a month positive cash flow but I’m shooting for a deal that will give me $600+ monthly cash flow. (Hey, why not shoot for the moon?).
I also read an article today that said Bank of America is trying out a new program where they’ll let a homeowner that’s 60 days or more behind in their payments, rent the home from them, transfer ownership to the bank and the bank will forgive the debt. If this happens in any volume, that might drastically reduce the bank owned inventory from hitting the streets and further hamper my ability to find the “deal of the century”. I’ll be keeping a close eye on that.