I have bought and sold real estate in the past and would consider myself a fairly knowledgeable investor. Over this last weekend, however, I decided to “walk the walk” of real estate investors who are GENUINELY in the game of finding good opportunities in this market. I learned a great deal in the process and had a list of 30 REO properties around Southern California all available at discounted rates through a few lenders. The more you buy from them, the greater the discount by the way.

Seeing that many properties in a day is a grind and to make matters worse, the temperature was over 100 degrees everywhere I went. What a day, so bring lots of water when you go out looking! Here are some stats.

The lenders represented that 93% of the properties were occupied by tenants. According to my observation, only 53% were occupied. That’s one the big values in a visual inspection. The properties ranged from fair condition to very good. None of them were in either poor or excellent condition with this group. 97% had a least two properties for sale around them within visual range, and about 50% of them had other vacant properties near them that were not on my list to see. So, be alert for other properties not on your search list as they may represent opportunity for you and it can affect valuation if too many properties are for sale in the area...

Prior to setting out on the inspection, I ran all of the properties through www.homesmartreports.com to determine a valuation and a risk or market strength score to try to weed out poor properties. I was able to find solid information on 29 of 30 properties. On one property, the address did not exist on that street! It’s either a transposed street number of fraud is involved! By the way, HomeSmart Reports can analyze an entire portfolio of property (hundreds or thousands at a time) and it can save you incredible hours in individual property look-up times. Don’t forget to put a value on YOUR TIME in this process!

Taking that information, I added a photo, assessment of exterior condition, landscape assessment (33% had dead landscaping), traffic volume (quiet, medium, busy) as it would affect value, occupancy and confirmed number of stories which HomeSmart had correctly so that future references could be made. I considered this analysis at least equal to a Broker Price Opinion as I am about to make an investment and I trust my own research. Plus, I was able to do it in a hard day’s work and I’m ready to act which I will do later today or tomorrow. Other people will have to wait longer and that should give me an advantage.

So, in the end, automated property research with HomeSmart Reports data helped me a great deal in weeding our very risky properties. Having a specific plan literally mapped out using Mapquest saved me a lot of driving time. I find that having gone through the process I am more motivated to get on with an offer since I don’t want all the research to be wasted and I expect to buy at least one house. I’ll get back to you all with how things came out if this is of interest to you. I’ll judge that by how many people comment on my little escapade.

By the way, for real estate agents with a good plan to show lenders for marketing their REO's, this whole thing represents a great opportunity.