Banks and Hurricane Distractions

So our goal for this week was to establish relationships with small local banks and call some hard money lenders (HML). We want to begin making offers on some REO properties this week. We had to rule out many of the banks for various reasons but we have two potentials to work with. We just need to have meetings with the loan officer next week so that's progress. I spoke with two HML as well. They started sounded a little bit like a regular lending institution which was a surprise to me. They wanted 10-25% cash for a down payment and some want proof of X reserve dollars. I suspect they have to be more selective these days....anyways there was one lender that will loan 100% including rehab costs so I think that one may be a winner depending on how things go with the banks.

We also met with a couple real estate agents this week. We're going to focus on recently expired listings, unsold listings with at least 4 months on the market, and listings that include keywords such as: divorce, distressed, HUD, pre-foreclosure, vacant, handyman special, investor.

We were supposed to get our bandit signs out this weekend but we're going to hold off on that. There's a threat of Hurricane Ike - a nasty category 3 storm - and everyone is running around buying up everything at Target, Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Home Depot. I'm thinking its probably not a good time to be putting the signs out. So we'll do that next weekend once the storm has passed and hopefully the storm doesn't impact us much at all!