He must have received his law degree in the snail-mail. The guy didn’t know the difference between foreclosure and power-of-sale.
Why is this even important?
Foreclosure versus Power of Sale
Because I advise a number of funds (REITs, MICs, Private Equity Funds, Mortgage Trusts, Mutual Fund Trusts, individual private lenders such as family offices), I always suggest a few things to them:
Foreclosure is the main proceeding in the matter of a loan default in the US, power of sale in Canada. I am not a lawyer (just a lowly engineer) so I can’t provide any legal advice or opinions, but my take on this power of sale versus foreclosure thing is this—
If you use a foreclosure proceeding instead, you apply to the courts, get the title switched to your name, put in place your own property manager, fix all the issues and run it yourself.
Then you can decide if you want to sell it or keep it or when to sell it or refinance it.
Private equity behemoth Blackstone Group did exactly that:
When the credit crunch struck in 2008 and created a tidal wave of foreclosures across the United States, private equity giant Blackstone Group was among a number of Wall Street firms that saw an opportunity to bet on an eventual housing recovery. The firm, under the guidance of its billionaire head of real estate Jonathan Gray, created a company called Invitation Homes in 2012 that spent an estimated $9.6 billion dollars scooping up thousands of properties nationwide and turning them into rentals.
Notice they foreclosed on the properties. Then they set up their own subsidiary (Invitation Homes), a “a vertically integrated, scalable company with in-house capabilities of acquiring, renovating, leasing, maintaining, and managing single family homes.”
By 2017, Blackstone successfully IPO’d Invitation Homes, a kind of exit without exiting strategy since they still control the company and own a lot of its equity…
None of this would have been possible under a POS scenario, vaporizing a ton of Blackstone’s upside and most of its subsequent and abundant fees.
Another big downside of POS is that the original owner in default has the right to cure the default (if s/he can source new funding) right up to about an hour before completion so if you buys a building under a power of sale notice, you are never sure you are going to end up with it until you do.
But there’s a flip side… taking advantage of Power of Sale situations
The flip side is, if you are a buyer, you can take advantage big time of sellers. Lenders aren’t generally knowledgeable about anything other than mortgage lending. They know practically nothing about real estate, its management, animation strategies, renovations, proper leasing, etc.
I can prove it to you. My wife and I recently bought a 3-story building on a main street in a booming small town in Ontario under POS for $280,500. It’s about 12,000 sq ft of built space above grade, meaning it cost about $23.38 per sq ft. You can’t build a doghouse or outhouse for that (about $40). Mind you it needs a lot of TLC.
And the lender almost certainly took a (financial) bath. They had to eat all kinds of legal fees, remit tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid property taxes to the town, pay old utility bills, write-off unpaid interest and compensate their realtor as well.
This project and model is something I call Main Street Makeovers; basically, it’s about buying property inexpensively in small towns within an hour or two of larger centers, then fixing them up so they appeal to young people looking for greener pastures where they can walk everywhere and older folks looking for a new adventure and a lower cost of living… After having the project reappraised, you can remortgage it, take funds out tax-free, and rinse and repeat the process. If you do multiple buildings in the same town, you create a situation where the tide raises all boats, yours most of all.
Prof Bruce
FOR REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT AND BUSINESS COACHING THAT’LL HELP YOU PROVIDE FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY FOR 3-GENERATIONS, PLEASE CONTACT:
Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD
Real Estate Investment and Business coach
ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker
Ottawa Senators founder
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• MAKING IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE
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• FEHAJ, FOR EVERY HOME A JOB, FEJAH, FOR EVERY JOB A HOME
• MAKE YOUR HOME WORK FOR YOU, INSTEAD OF YOU WORKING FOR IT
• HIGHER ROI NOT JUST FOR OWNERS AND INVESTORS, BUT FOR TENANTS, GUESTS, VISITORS, NEIGHBORHOODS, COMMUNITIES, TOWNS, VILLAGES, CITIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT TOO
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