My clients and I have been looking for deals on rental homes in the Tampa Bay area.  After wasting too much time on short sales, we decided to pick up the pace on bank REO’s.  I’m happy to report the banks are willing to deal on these now.  Most interesting was the number of deals we were beaten out on.  Over the last few months I had gotten lazy thinking we had plenty of time to look at new listings and to get my clients to see the property and our rehab teams there to give us estimated repairs costs. 

But this week 3 of the 4 properties we liked were already sold by the time I sat down to write offers on them.  So the market is heating up now.  It’s time to get back into the action especially with the FHA loan situation providing a good alternative to subprime loans.  For people who want to flip houses or do lease options to their tenants, FHA will allow the sellers to pay their down payments and up to 6% of the purchase price towards their closing costs and prepaids.

The contract we are negotiating had a listed price of $149,900.  It was a 3/2/2 with 1550 SF.  Nice area, little work needed.  We offered $114K, the bank came back at $140K, and we countered at $125K and are still waiting to hear.  At the asking price, the house already had about $20,000 in equity.  The good news was that the bank responded in a couple of hours instead of days like short sales are taking or just automatically rejecting our offer.   Maybe the banks are finally realizing it’s time to take some of these deals instead of keeping hoards of inventory on the books while they try to get top dollar.  As a broker who’s been taking investor buyers out of Florida for the last 2 years, I feel it’s definitely time to look to Tampa Bay for cash flow and for ease of management in your own back yard. 

If you don’t want to manage the property yourself, I provide property management to my clients who buy in Tampa Bay.  We treat each property just like we owned it ourselves in terms of screening potential renters and the quality of the repairs we insist upon. 

If you’re looking to get a deal on a foreclosed property, give me a call today at 813-956-3563.  You’ll be pleased with the deals we find, the turnkey service we provide and our professionalism and experience.  We appreciate your referrals to owner/occupied buyers and to investors.