Focus on Foreclosure claims a “WIN-WIN Solution”
I have been rebuilding my hard drive and watching infomercials this weekend. Apparently Focus on Foreclosure is in town this weekend. The infomercial repeats it’s goal over and over again: “create a win-win solution for families in distress while making a profit for yourself.” The well-dressed announcer says repeatedly “no one is taken advantage of AT ALL!” A bunch of “successful participants” show off their checks for $20,000, $49,000, etc. So where do they think the money comes from? Someone loses, it, so it ain’t a win-win, folks. That money comes out of the equity the foreclosed homeowner should have received. All Focus on Foreclosure does is teach people to strip that equity from a homeowner who doesn’t have enough financial knowledge to know better. It’s an awful lot to pay to “save the foreclosed homeowner’s credit,” which is the main justification put forth in the infomercial. That doesn’t sound fair to me.
Maybe I’ll go to the training myself. It might be an interesting learning experience.
well - I don’t know anything about the business of Focus on Foreclosure so i can’t comment on what they practice and teach.
However i can say something about our business. We run an ethical and profitable pre-foreclosure business since 2003. In our business we have helped many clients from being foreclosed on, vast majority of whom had no equity in their houses (”up side down”), and still make large profit. How? you understand the lenders’ position and make a deal with them to discount the debts since lenders typical will end up discounting as much as 50% in the end to sell the properties after they become REOs (see http://www.loanperformance.com/pressreleases/pr111606.aspx - read the study in PDF) - and that’s why it’s in lender’s best interest to struck a deal with investors like us prior to the court house sale (commonly known as “short sale”).
It’s truely a win-win-win. Read our client testominials (http://mysolutionworks.com/testimonials.html), and you will understand foreclosure business can be and should be a highly profitable, extremely satisfying business with high ethical standards.
Forget the middle-men. Find a good property that is days short of foreclosure and make the deal with their lending institution yourself, directly. It doesn’t really save the seller’s credit, but it does keep a foreclosure off of it. It does save the lending institution some potential loss, and it saves you a LOT of money. This is particularly good if the property is otherwise quite desirable but has an easily fixable quirk that is keeping it from selling to typical buyers. You must be pre-approved for a loan equal to or greater than the offer price. I got my house that way.
@John & KT: I’m not as familiar with the method you both refer to, probably because, unlike Focus on Foreclosure, it doesn’t involve stripping the homeowner of equity in the house. As both of you point out, there are ways to purchase foreclosed homes and profit by doing so that don’t involve screwing the homeowner.
I went to a “Focus on Forclosure” seminar for part of this last weekend; it was a gift from my wife? I wasn’t able to make the whole seminar. It was not free (200 bucks!) and the presenter (Brad) was fairly informative, but kind of reminded me of a “time share” salesman. We were asked to call our credit card companies, during lunch and in the evenings, to increase credit limits, eliminate annual fees and to reduce interest rates (which actually is a good thing, but we’ve already done that). We were also told to get equity lines of credit on our homes so cash would be available. There was a lot of pressure to hook up with staff (mentors) in the back of the room (to put “a plan” in place), buy their software package and pushing of more seminars. Luckily, or maybe not, I was got sick and was not able to attend the last day of the 3 day seminar and my question is this: “Has anyone been to one of these seminars and do they expect their “students” to fork out lumps of cash?”
I went to there three day seminar and i was highly disappointed. At the free seminar the gentleman stated that we were going to learn the steps of forecloser tax liens and so on. All we learned was that they wanted more money to teach us anything. And i almost made the mistake of falling for there sales pitch. Until when i asked if they financed the program themselves and the one salesman told me no that they had tried it but it just didnt work out well why not if this is such a money making deal then why wouldnt they finance it ? They could make money on the interest from the loan they give you. So after the guy told me that i backed off and thank God i did because the more i research this company the more i see that my gut was right