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Teaching

The Institute Announces New Programs

It’s hard to get started in real estate-based investing. You have to raise capital, form a business entity, find property or loan opportunities, find lenders, find contractors, find real estate agents, negotiate prices, and on and on. Where to begin or how to scale up can be confusing. It’s hard to figure out where to turn.

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Flower Bed

First Impressions Mean A Lot

If you’ve ever searched for homes on line, you know the feeling of looking at the interior pictures of a property and falling in love with it, but when you pull up to the property itself, you cringe. First impressions mean a great deal. You can spend all you want on updating a property, but if the outside looks like the Munster’s home, you can be losing potential buyers before they even get through the front door.

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Fee Income

The 4 Ways that Lenders Make Money

It’s standard practice within the note industry to obtain a Broker’s Price Opinion, or BPO, to place a value on a property within an investor’s portfolio. When selling a note, it is expected from buyers that a BPO will be in the offering package, but how accurate are BPOs and do they add value to an investor when making a decision on buying a loan?

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Foreclosure

BPOs and Property Condition Reports

It’s standard practice within the note industry to obtain a Broker’s Price Opinion, or BPO, to place a value on a property within an investor’s portfolio. When selling a note, it is expected from buyers that a BPO will be in the offering package, but how accurate are BPOs and do they add value to an investor when making a decision on buying a loan?

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Money

The Good and Bad of Leverage

Many, if not most people, dream of building financial independence through real estate investment. The vast majority of people that want to start investing don’t have enough money in the coffers to buy their first property outright. Banks usually aren’t willing to finance a fix-n-flipper or, as one banker put it, “a rental jockey.” Hard money is usually where people turn to start building their dream, but what is the impact of borrowing on real estate investments?

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IMN

Doug Smith Speaks at IMN Conference

The Institute’s own Doug Smith will be speaking this week at IMN’s “NPLs, Notes, and Default Servicing Forum” at the Ritz Carlton in Fort Lauderdale Florida on Monday, February 10th and Tuesday, February 11th. IMN is excited to return to Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 10-11, for our next NPLs, Notes & Default Servicing Forum.

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Banker

Uncollectible Notes

Jane (not her real name) purchased a nonperforming loan where the borrower had not paid in years. She purchased it for a huge discount from the collateral value and immediately had her servicer try to work through the collection waterfall (see our previous article). When they got to the point of foreclosing, however, they learned that it was too late to foreclose on the property. How could this be?

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Taxes

Lending, Cash Flow, and Extraordinary Events

One of the hardest parts of making a loan decision is determining the true cash flow situation for a self-employed borrower. If you lend money to borrowers, chances are that those borrowers are commercial in nature as consumer lending laws and considerably more stringent. That means that in most situations, you’ll be working with self-employed borrowers. Our members-only area has classes on cash flowing self-employed borrowers, but we wanted to focus on one area that can really throw a lender a curve ball…extraordinary events.

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Piggy Bank

Borrowing in the Name of an LLC through a Bank

Have you ever walked into a bank branch to borrow money in the name of your LLC only to be told that they don’t do that type of lending. Unfortunately, that is a regular scenario that pays out all across our country. Luckily, that is not necessarily true. There are secrets that most branch bankers don’t know. We’re going to share those with you right now.

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Old House

Zillow Zestimates, Tax Assessments, and True Values

It can be quite confusing when you see a big valuation difference between the value that the tax assessor places on a property and the value that a consumer site like Zillow places on a property. Fortunately, there is a way to figure out what the approximate true value of the property is without hiring an appraiser.

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