Tag Archives: Investors

Visio Financial Services, a residential real estate marketplace lender in the U.S., revealed the results of its Annual Residential Real Estate Investor Report today. The report found that investors are expanding their property searches, buying in higher price bands, and broadening their strategies in 2015.

Even as the demand for rental housing has increased in most markets, investors continue to prefer to flip houses due to a recent combination of price appreciation and decreased inventory, according to Auction.com.

The recent hot spots for flipping include California and parts of the South, according to Trulia. Six of the top 10 metro areas where flips represented the highest share of home sales were located in California, two were in Tennessee (Nashville and Knoxville), and Florida (Fort Lauderdale) and Massachusetts (Cambridge-Newton-Framingham) had one each in the top 10.

Judge Margaret Sweeney denied the government's attempt to stay court proceedings in the case, gaining a victory for Fairholme Funds and its CEO, Bruce Berkowitz, who sued the government in 2013 over the sweeping of GSE profits into the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Ocwen's response called the investors' claims "ill-conceived" and state that "[w]hile knee-jerk foreclosures may redound to the special economic interests of your clients, they are not in the best interests of the trusts as a whole, not consistent with industry practice, and therefore prohibited under the servicing agreements."

Though various reports have suggested in the last year that flipping opportunities are dwindling, Auction.com's latest survey affirms that flipping is still going strong: 50 percent of investors said they intended to flip the homes they purchased, compared to 47.3 percent who said they intended to rent them out (2.7 percent were undecided).

Out of all the investors surveyed by Auction.com in November, 50.5 percent said they're going to rent out their properties, while 46.6 percent plan to flip them to another buyer. The preference toward renting was more evident among one-time purchasers, 72.2 percent of whom said they plan to rent out the auctioned home.

Nationwide, home sales fell 1.2 percent in the third quarter compared to the same period last year, the brokerage said in a recent report. Sales have been down year-over-year for every quarter so far in 2014. At the same time, sales of homes priced at at least $1 million continued to lift, rising 9 percent over the past year.

According to RealtyTrac, the median price of single-family homes and condos rose 2 percent to $193,000 nationwide in October. This is their highest level since the beginning of the recession in September 2008. That's also a rise of 16 percent from a year ago, though it's still 19 percent below the median peak of $237,537 that occurred in August 2006.

Home flipping sales, or those in which a home is purchased and sold within 12 months, represented 4 percent of all single-family home sales in the United States in the third quarter, a decline from 4.6 percent in Q2 2014 and from 5.6 percent in the third quarter of 2013, according to RealtyTrac.