According to the Chairman of the Board of the Miami Association of Realtors (MAR), there is nothing like an unusually harsh winter season to send South Florida’s home sales soaring[1]. “There is solid demand for local properties…as we see increased interest from U.S. buyers looking for moderate weather and an exciting lifestyle,” Jack Levine said of Miami’s climbing home sales. In the fourth quarter of 2010 sales of homes and condominiums together increased 29 percent compared to a year prior, giving Miami 10 consecutive quarters of increasing sales. Wintery weather …

Bidding at a real estate auction can be complicated and intimidating, but it becomes even more so – and actually frightens a lot of would-be investors off entirely – when the issue of bid-rigging comes into play. A major issue in today’s real estate auction arena is that of “bidding rings” or “clubs” of bidders who all agree ahead of time to put competition aside until the auction is over in order to keep prices artificially low. At first, this might seem harmless. After all, if businesspeople get together and …

In the Detroit area, a record tax auction in October 2010 sold 4,300 properties and got those properties off the books and helped the city recoup staggering losses causes by the non-payment of property taxes. Sound like a success? Absolutely not, says Maggie DeSantis, president of a local non-profit development corporation. “[We’ve] got to make it so onerous to speculate [in property],” she explains, “and we have to do it now”[1]. DeSantis and others like the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, who believe that “shrinking” the area of Detroit is …

In spite of ongoing foreclosure moratoria and other administrative delays that you might expect to keep homeowners – even the distressed ones – in possession of their homes for longer periods of time, U.S. homeownership rates hit a 13-year low at the end of 2010[1]. While some analysts believed that homeownership might actually rise slightly in the wake of the robo-signer fiascos that threatened to stall many lenders’ foreclosures indefinitely, the Census Bureau reported this month that homeownership fell another 0.4 percent in the final quarter of 2010, bringing homeownership …

In Closter, New Jersey, the small town was set to auction off a local mall at a tax lien auction in an effort to “recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes from…owners.” And investors were at the ready, eager to bid on the commercial property. Now, however, the entire process is stalled thanks to a last-minute bankruptcy filing by the property’s owners which effectively prevented the sale from moving forward[1].
In this case, bidders were lucky. The bankruptcy filing happened before the sale rather than immediately after. When the …

New Jersey knows all about tough economic times, but tax lien sales numbers seem to indicate that things are getting even tighter, according to Al Stanley, a local tax collector in Galloway, New Jersey whose township recently held its biggest tax lien sale ever, selling more than 1,200 liens for $1.6 million[1]. Stanley reports that the number of liens being sold each year has been on the rise since 2004 – the beginning of the end of the real estate boom by many analysts’ timelines – and that the number …

Homeowners across the country have been dealing with serious financial woes in large part because of the real estate crisis. While they are finding it hard to acquire additional funds for housing, though, the opposite seem to be happening for real estate developers. And this is not because developers have been faring better than homeowners but only because the market seems to be dealing with short-term memory loss [1].
According to experts, developers who have defaulted and lost money on real estate gambles are still able to attract funding because plenty …