Governor Charlie Crist of Florida recently signed into law Statute 501.1377 (HB 643/SB 992) or what has since been called Anti-Fraud Legislation. The second part of this legislation targets certain types of foreclosure-related transactions including the p...

By way of background information regarding Florida's Foreclosure-rescue Fraud Legislation, investors are a much maligned group of small business entrepreneurs who take financial risks to purchase properties when almost no one else will, and face the finan...

The question of how people stay in foreclosed properties sometimes for years is one with a simple answer. The foreclosure process is designed to take title away from a homeowner for non-payment of the mortgages on the property. If a homeowner stops making...

A problem that is frequently happening to homeowners is their home has more mortgage than market value. With the severe decline in real estate markets across the country, the hardest hit areas have hundreds of thousands of "upside down" mortgages. Simply,...

A lease option can stop a foreclosure by the reinstatement of the late payments to the lender. Usually the lease option takes two additional "parts" to make it work. First, the homeowner will deed or transfer the property to someone else, usually an inves...

On May 28, 2008, Governor Crist of Florida signed into law Statute 501.1377 (HB 643/SB 992) or so called Anti-Fraud Legislation. The real estate investing community has labeled the new legislation as anti-investor, despite the statute formally being calle...

While investors are calling Florida's new foreclosure legislation "Anti-investor" it was actually meant to be an anti-fraud statute. Previous legislation in Florida referred to as "Victimization" statutes also tried to slow or stop the pace of investor fr...

Historically when a homeowner goes into foreclosure and the only resolution is the lender getting back a deed, this likely results in a deficiency between the amounts owed from the final judgment when the property is eventually sold. This "deficient" amou...

I am often asked why a lender wouldn't take back a deed in lieu of foreclosure when the homeowner offered his deed to the lender before he went into foreclosure. The lender will not consider a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure until the homeowne...

The process of buying properties that have been through the foreclosure process can occur in a couple of ways. First, the home can be sold at the foreclosure auction with the buyer being someone other than the original lender. Secondly, if there are no bi...

The process of buying properties that have been through the foreclosure process can occur in a couple of ways. First, the home can be sold at the foreclosure auction with the buyer being someone other than the original lender. Secondly, if there are no bi...

Banks and lending institutions that own real estate that was acquired through foreclosure call these properties real estate owned or REO's. REO's represent a liability to lenders because of the required accounting that literally "sucks" away assets of the...

It is an enormous frustration to investors doing short sales that the lenders take months to make a decision and just don't seem to care. The homeowner stuck in the middle gets frustrated because he doesn't know how soon he will be required to move or wor...

There is often confusion about what is a short sale and a short pay with a lender in foreclosure. A short sale is where the lender is willing to discount the existing mortgage(s) and sell to an investor for a "cash" transaction or an end buyer who does fi...

The term "keys for cash" in foreclosure is common in two situations. The first place it is often used is when a lender agrees to a short sale and the homeowner needs get-away money to leave the property. Most often the investor buying the property will ex...