Buying a foreclosure home can provide great opportunities for people who want to buy a house at a great price. One company helps would-be homebuyers navigate the pitfalls of buying a bank owned home or other house that has been affected by foreclosure.

San Francisco, CA July 3, 2008 — Foreclosures and the American real estate market’s price declines have continued to dominate news headlines across the country for well over a year, but one company is bucking the bad news trend. Sacramento, CA-based The Home Buying Center.com (www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com) has been helping connect home sellers who want to sell a house quickly with investors for years, and they have expanded their service offering last year to help consumers find and buy foreclosure homes.

“For the first time homebuyer who waited until now to buy a home the deals are everywhere,” said company president, Patrick McGilvray, J.D., CFP®. “It’s important that prospective buyers understand that buying a foreclosure house can be a great opportunity to buy a house at a cheap price, and they must be aware of some of the possible pitfalls.”

The pitfalls McGilvray mentioned can include buying houses in an ‘as-is’ condition with hidden problems that may not have been visible during a casual inspection such as dry rot or problems with a cracked foundation. Buyers, he cautioned, must do significant homework before signing on the dotted line. Additionally, he said that it is crucial for would-be home buyers to be pre-qualified for a mortgage loan.

“That’s why working with a team like ours can be a real advantage,” McGilvray said. “We provide the consumer access to the nation’s largest network of foreclosure and pre-foreclosure homes via thousands of real estate investors and real estate agents who specialize in bank owned homes. We also have the resources needed to help hopeful house buyers get qualified for a mortgage.”

The company was originally founded as a website devoted to connecting people who wanted to sell a house quickly at a discount to a real estate investor, but, because of requests from customers, they started offering a foreclosure location service for buyers in 2007. McGilvray said that their company has been growing rapidly since their inception and that they had recently taken some venture capital money in exchange for equity from an angel investor.

Despite the downturn in America’s housing market, which McGilvray thinks could still take years to fully recover from, he is optimistic about real estate services and the internet’s ability to connect consumers with exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily. When asked where he thought should consumers turn to first to help them find answers to their real estate questions, he answered with a smile, “Other than The Home Buying Center.com? Why Google, of course.”

Next month, Michelle Augustine plans to walk away from her four-bedroom house in a Sacramento, Calif., subdivision and let the property fall into foreclosure. But before doing so, she hopes to lock in the purchase of another home nearby.

“I can find the same exact house as what I live in right now for half the price,” says Ms. Augustine, 44 years old, who runs a child-care service out of her home. She says she soon will be unable to afford her monthly payments, which will jump to $4,000 from $3,300 in August, and she doesn’t want to continue to own a home that is now worth $200,000 less than what she paid for it two years ago.

In markets hit hardest by falling home prices and rising foreclosures, lenders and brokers are discovering a new phenomenon: the “buy and bail,” in which borrowers with good credit buy a new home — often at a much lower price — then bail out of the “upside down” mortgage on their first home.

Homeowners are able to pull off this gambit — which some lenders and real-estate agents call mortgage fraud — by taking advantage of mortgage-lending practices that allow them to buy a new primary residence before their existing residence has been sold. And with the lending industry in disarray as it tries to restructure millions of mortgages, some boast they are able to pull off the strategy with ease.

In some cases, homeowners are coached through the buy-and-bail process by real-estate agents and brokers who see nothing wrong with it. Some blame the phenomenon in part on lenders’ unwillingness to cut deals or restructure loans made when home prices were inflated. “It’s just a business decision,” says Linda Caoili, a Sacramento real-estate agent who is working with Ms. Augustine and others who are considering walking away from their mortgages. “If you’re upside-down $250,000, why would you keep it? It just doesn’t make sense.”

To be sure, walking away from a mortgage, even if legal, has plenty of drawbacks: Borrowers lose the ability to take out unsecured loans, since foreclosures can stay on a credit report for seven years. In some states, lenders can sue for assets, including a new house. Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage underwriter, recently revised the amount of time borrowers with a foreclosure must wait to receive a home loan to five years from four. Proposed Fannie Mae guidelines, which could take effect later this month, also would require those borrowers to make a 10% down payment and meet a minimum credit score after the five-year period.

While buy-and-bail is on the rise, the practice doesn’t appear to be widespread. Credit is much tighter now than it was during the real-estate boom, and most families with an upside-down mortgage likely will hold on to their homes and hope the market improves in the future — even though many of them could lose their properties.

Still, with home prices falling rapidly in some parts of the country, a growing number of frustrated consumers are willing to take the risk — especially in so-called nondeficiency states such as California and Arizona, where it is more difficult for a lender to sue consumers who walk away from their mortgages. Borrowers who bought or refinanced their home with a personal line of credit, however, instead of a home-purchase loan — a common practice during the housing boom — could be sued by a lender in those states. Borrowers also could be on the hook if lenders can show that homeowners committed fraud by misrepresenting themselves on their loan application.

Yet even in cases in which a lender could attach a lien on the new home, some homeowners simply assume that lenders are too swamped. “So many people are foreclosing, is it cost effective for lenders to go after all of these people?” says Steve Hawks, a Las Vegas real-estate agent who handles lender-owned properties.

That works in the favor of borrowers such as Blair Morrow. Last year, he rented out his Sacramento home when he moved to Houston for a new job, but he lost those renters in February. He quickly arranged to buy a new home in Houston, fearing that his old residence would be foreclosed and he would take a big hit on his credit.

“I had 30 days to make a decision: Live in a rental house the rest of my life or buy a house and walk away from the one in California,” says Mr. Morrow, 56, who works at a car dealership. He wrestled with the decision for a while, but justified it once Countrywide Financial Corp., the lender for his first home, approved the new home loan. “Countrywide didn’t say peep,” he says. Countrywide didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Ms. Augustine, the Sacramento day-care provider, became a first-time homeowner in November 2006 by taking out two loans with nothing down to cover the $426,000 home purchase. With her home valued at about $220,000 now, she is actively looking in nearby communities for another one to buy before the bank forecloses on her current home.

The mortgage industry is starting to wise up to the practice and is scrambling to fight back. Buy-and-bail is “certainly fraudulent and unfortunately on an uptick,” says Gwen Muse-Evans, vice president for credit policy and controls at Fannie Mae. Although she doesn’t have data to quantify the size and scope of the trend, Ms. Muse-Evans says overwhelming anecdotal reports have prompted the agency to draft tougher regulations aimed at closing one big loophole that allows underwater homeowners to qualify for new home loans.

That loophole currently works like this: Homeowners provide a rental agreement showing that they will rent out their first home, and underwriters allow rental income to cover as much as 75% of the mortgage payments on the first home when determining whether the borrower can make payments on two homes. This allows homeowners to secure a second mortgage that they might not otherwise afford.

Under revised Fannie Mae guidelines, which could take effect next week, loan applicants who claim they will rent out their first home will have to produce supporting evidence, including an executed lease agreement. Borrowers also will have to prove that they can pay the mortgage, property taxes and insurance for both residences. The guidelines will make an exception only for borrowers who have at least 30% equity in their current home.

Of course, many individuals still can qualify for that second loan because of a strong credit and cash position. If they “have the intention of fraud, then at the end of the day there’s really little you can do to totally prevent that,” says Ms. Muse-Evans.

Some private lenders aren’t waiting for Fannie’s lead. In April, underwriters handling bank-owned properties at IndyMac Bancorp Inc. told brokers they would require borrowers purchasing new homes while retaining their existing home as a rental to prove that they could make full payments on both homes to qualify for a loan. A memo sent to a Southern California broker said the policy change was prompted by “losses from individuals walking away from properties after the acquisition of a new home.”

An IndyMac spokesman said the bank hadn’t changed its policies and had always “underwritten loans with an eye towards insuring that our borrowers could readily rent out their current property and/or reasonably support both payments.”

Realtors say the new guidelines could put further pressure on sales, but Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says the impact of such guidelines on sales would be marginal. He calls Fannie Mae’s response appropriate because any artificial increase in home sales hurts the average consumer.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hawks, the Las Vegas broker, says he receives one to two dozen inquiries every week from individuals inquiring about a buy-and-bail. “People are starting to ask how much their good credit is worth,” particularly when their home is underwater by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The tactic doesn’t appeal to people such as John Ristuccia, a 48-year-old Buckeye, Ariz., paper-company sales director whose job was moved to Houston in August. He is trying to complete a “short sale” for $425,000 on his five-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home, which was appraised for $800,000 last year. In a short sale, a lender allows the sale of property for less than the amount due on the outstanding loan and often forgives the remaining debt.

Even though he might be able to qualify for a second home loan, Mr. Ristuccia says he wouldn’t consider sticking his bank with his suburban Phoenix property. “Just personally I’ve got a problem with that,” he says. “I really can’t put it in terms other than it feels wrong.”

SACRAMENTO, CA – In the first quarter of 2008 home foreclosures in the United States reached a peak and the pain was felt by all types of borrowers, not just those with the now infamous subprime adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).

While subprime borrowers led the pack in allowing their homes to go to foreclosure many so-called prime and alt-a borrowers were unable to consecutively make payments on their houses as well. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (www.mbaa.org), .99 percent of home loans in America entered the foreclosure process in the January to March time frame. The number the previous year was .58 percent.

The trade association first began measuring loan delinquency rates in 1979, and this year’s results were the highest on record at 6.35 percent.

On a positive note, the Mortgage Banker’s Association senior researcher, Jay Brinkmann, predicted that most states should see a trailing off of foreclosure activity by years end. But, troubled states like California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada, which saw record prices spikes in residential real estate values, may see their foreclosure woes persist well into 2009.

For the homeowner who is trying to sell a house in the current market the challenge can be finding a qualified buyer who is pre-qualified for a mortgage loan. Many buyers have reported that they are simply not able to get funding for a house purchase despite having good credit and down payments available.

Real estate and foreclosure expert Patrick McGilvray, J.D., president of Sacaramento, CA-based The Home Buying Center.com (www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com) said, “For people looking to buy a foreclosure house there are opportunities aplenty. It’s important for these buyers, though, to get pre-qualified for a home loan before they go shopping because sellers, especially lenders with a large inventory of bank owned REO houses don’t want to spend time with people who aren’t ready, willing and able to buy.”

Real estate industry feels heat as home values continue to fall in much of the nationSACRAMENTO, CA – Real estate continues to be a sore spot for the US economy as prices for single family homes were down 7.7% in the first quarter of 2008 compared to a year earlier.

The National Association of Realtors reported the recent numbers and indicated that this was the biggest yearly decline since they began record-keeping in 1982.  Median sales prices were down to $196,300 at the end of March, a 4.8% drop compared to Q4 of 2008.

In Sacramento, California prices fell more than 29% and the median dropped to $258,500.  Prices in Riverside, California dropped more than 27% to $287,100.

An internet real estate company based in Sacramento, www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, reported an increase in consumers requesting help with selling their houses as well as an increase in buyers who are looking for deals on foreclosure houses.  “Deals on foreclosure houses are one of our specialties, and we’re getting a lot of traffic to our website because of that,” said company president Patrick McGilvray.

The Home Buying Center reported that a lot of their activity is happening in the states hardest hit by the housing crisis that occurred in the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown.  According to McGilvray the biggest numbers of homeowners seeking help, and buyers seeking deals, are occurring in California, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Michigan.

Foreclosure activity resulted in more than 155,000 homes taken back by lenders since last year, and mortgage payment delinquencies more than doubled during the time as well.

SACRAMENTO, CA - April 12, 2008  - (OBSNEWS) A fast growing online real estate company specializing in buying houses and providing foreclosure houses to first time homebuyers has expanded their services to incorporate a include real estate relocation company aspect to their operations.  Famous for their ‘we buy houses’ slogan, www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com has expanded their efforts across the United States to provide relocation services to consumers and corporations alike. 

Seeing a great need for people who want to sell or buy real estate and have all aspects of their transition coordinated by one team, TheHomeBuyingCenter.com acted to provide more services than simply buying houses.  In addition to buying houses quickly for cash, the company also has a nationwide network of certified real estate agents who are specially trained in how to sell houses fast in difficult markets and how to buy foreclosure houses for their clients from banks and other lenders who have REO properties for sale.

The company reports that if a home meets the company’s team of investors’ criteria one of the  nationwide investors will buy it from you for a no-hassle quick closing for cash.  In addition a full range of real estate relocation services if offered to help you get top dollar for your house quickly and to buy foreclosure houses at a fraction of the cost of similar homes on the resale market.

The real estate market is one of major investment, which can be daunting to many people. The concept of buying or selling a house may cause a potential seller or buyer to panic or become frustrated, settling for less than they deserve, or more than they bargained for. With the ever increasing number of people who buy and sell online, even properties have joined the mounting list of search results from key phrases like

“I need to sell my house fast ” or “I want cash for my home“. It is obvious that society has sped up at an exponential rate to a pace never before conceived but where there is an overwhelming demand, someone will find a way to supply that need.

What most people don’t know is that now, a time when the economy changes rapidly, may be the perfect time to buy or sell a home. Before the worry settles in, one may be interested to know that there are a multitude of online services that will take on the monumental task of selling a home and makes it quick and easy for the buyer and for the seller.

www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, for example, is one of the leaders in sourcing those in need of selling their house quickly with a plethora of home buyers. Their website is very straight-forward and very simple to navigate, allowing the user to simply enter an address and a few other pieces of information into a form, then just submit and let the buyers and their offers come to them. Their promise is “fast and now” and in modern society, that is just the way people want it: they want to buy it now, sell it fast http://www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com and enjoy that new purchase as soon as possible.

Many have been involved with their families buying and selling property, and they may have noticed one commonality between all who have embarked on the arduous task of buying or selling their house: they become exhausted and hopeless. Even the nicest home will have buyers wondering if they will regret their purchase because no matter the price, the quality or the location, each property sale is a numbers game. The more people who see the place, the more people will be interested in buying it. So how does one reach so many people at once? The internet.

The internet has changed the way our society learns, the way they see the world, the way they think and the way they buy and sell. The internet allows a user to purchase an item from across an ocean with a few clicks and have it sitting on their doorstep within three business days. The internet allows the meeting of a hundred people in different rooms in different buildings in different cities from all over the world. This amazing tool has been harnessed by the people, and is user-friendly as ever, so that anyone with a computer can click on a simple link and within seconds, sell their home. www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com is a service that connects sellers with home investors to help them sell their house fast, and now is the perfect time to take advantage of a service like this.

For more information on selling your house fast (http://www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com), please visit TheHomeBuyingCenter.com

SACRAMENTO – The American housing market continues to see climbing foreclosure rates on single family homes with California, Florida, and Nevada showing the highest rates.  According to California-based www.RealtyTrac.com 223,651 homeowners in the United States were late on their mortgage payments in February of this year.  This figure represents an almost 60% increase from the same period last year when 139,922 homeowners were late on payments.

Other states that were hardest hit by foreclosures according to RealtyTrac were Texas, Ohio, and Michigan.  In many states across the US real estate investors are no longer buying houses at the auctions that are usually on the steps of the county courthouse at the end of  foreclosure proceedings.  This situation is caused because of falling home equity levels and as a result banks and mortgage lenders are being forced to take back houses themselves.  Lenders are then forced to try to sell these bank-owned properties, or REO (short for real estate owned), on an already crowded market.

“We buy houses and help homeowners by giving them an investor’s opinion as to the current market value of their house,” said Patrick McGilvray, president of www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com.  He continued, “If [homeowners] have some equity left in the house then an investor in our nationwide network may be able to buy their home for a cash purchase.  If not, our team members counsel our customers as to their best available options which may include working with a real estate agent to get their house sold quickly via a traditional listing agreement or a short sale listing agreement,” said

McGilvray said that many properties are still being bought and sold, and the key to selling a home in this market is pricing it well below comparable homes in the same local market.  Other steps to help homeowners avoid foreclosure include well-publicized programs led by government agencies, lenders, and consumer groups that try to modify existing loan provisions and create new repayment plans.

SACRAMENTO, Calif –OBSNews- On Thursday March 6, 2008 the Federal Reserve reported that during the final three quarters of 2007 the amount of equity that Americans had in their homes dropped to below 50%.  This is the first time that Americans have owed more on their homes collectively than they have owned since 1945.  This statistic shows that American homeowners borrowed large amounts of money against the value of their homes in recent year..  For homeowners who are trying to sell their properties to avoid foreclosure this statistic indicates a difficult market reality.

Mark Zandi, the head economist for Moody’s http://www.Economy.com, said “Consumers are growing more cautious, first, because they are now worth less, and they know it.  He added, “Secondly, they can’t borrow against their homes as aggressively as they did.

Economists point to falling home equity and link it to lessened consumer spending in other parts of the economy, especially home improvement and construction spending.  When this trend will reverse itself is anybody’s guess, but the consensus among real estate experts is that housing prices will continue to decline until sometime in 2009.

Approximately 10% of American houses, or 8.8 million, are estimated by Economy.com to have ‘negative equity.’  This means that more is owed on a house than the current market value.  Governmental fixes to this problem appear to have driven a wedge between Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Bush administration’s Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson.  Bernanke recently came out in favor of urging lenders to write down principal amounts owed by homeowners while Paulson has spoken out against such a practice.

“Falling home equity has definitely caused a lot of people to think twice about trying to sell their house now.  Yet, we are still helping hundreds of homeowners a week who want to understand their options when they choose to sell a house,” said foreclosure expert Patrick McGilvray, president of Sacramento, California-based http://www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com

McGilvray added, “We’re helping hundreds of people every month buy and sell houses, and it’s a great time for prospective home buyers who are looking for a bargain on a foreclosure house.  For people with a good job and a decent credit rating there are incredible deals out there in great neighborhoods.”

Despite the often gloomy news about US real estate, the National Association of Realtors reported that prices for housing actually rose in more than 70 metro regions, including a handful that reported increases of more than 10%.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - “The golden dream by the sea” is how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has fancifully described California. Yet for thousands who bought homes during the Golden State’s latest housing boom, foreclosures have turned recent months into a nightmare.

Economists disagree whether soaring foreclosures in California suggest the world’s eighth-largest economy is poised to slump or if it is just seeing its share of disarray from the subprime segment of the mortgage lending industry.

Whatever experts call it, Dorothy Hicks, 74, a retired federal employee in Oakland, California, is seeing her American dream of owning a home teetering on the edge of collapse. After refinancing into an adjustable-rate mortgage last year, she faces possible foreclosure on her home of nearly 40 years.

Hicks says she was told the mortgage was a fixed-rate loan, but was soon overwhelmed by soaring payments when its interest rates rose. “By the time you pay (utility) PG&E, the telephone and the mortgage, you don’t have any money,” she said.

Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics in Los Angeles says California’s economic outlook will darken as a growing number of households slash consumer spending to meet rising mortgage payments, especially on adjustable-rate and subprime loans that became popular for those with weak credit.

“We have a lot more of these shady mortgages out here, so that doesn’t bode well,” he said. “We’re due for a very traditional consumer-led downturn.”

RECESSION OR RESILIENCY?

Analysts had expected California’s economy to cool because its housing market has slowed from the torrid pace of recent years. Prices, long far above the national average, are flat or slipping as sales decline.

A report last week by DataQuick Information Systems pointed to additional trouble. The real estate trend tracking service tallied a record 17,408 homes in the state falling to foreclosure in the second quarter.

While a fraction of California’s 8.4 million residential properties, the foreclosures marked a jump of nearly 800 percent from a year earlier, propelled by markets awash in subprime loans.

Countrywide Financial Corp., the largest U.S. mortgage lender, last week slashed its 2007 forecast, suggesting that rising delinquencies and defaults may spread beyond subprime borrowers to borrowers with stronger credit.

“Business is picking up and I think it’s going to continue,” said Patrick McGilvray, president of TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, a Sacramento firm that matches distressed homeowners with investors and home buyers.

Other experts say California’s mortgage troubles will be largely contained to risky borrowers who bought houses more expensive than they could afford, as well as their lenders. But they see no signs of a slowdown in consumer spending or recession.

Howard Roth, chief economist for the state Department of Finance, said the economy of California, the most populous U.S. state, is fundamentally solid. Its current housing troubles pale compared with the beating the housing market suffered in the early 1990s from gutted aerospace payrolls, he said.

The state’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in June, compared with nearly 10 percent in late 1992 and early 1993, when Californians desperate to leave the state were parting with their homes at fire-sale prices.

“In the early 1990s we were losing a major industry and losing it for good. Now we’re paying the price for a housing bubble, but housing will come back,” Roth said. “We really haven’t lost jobs yet. That may happen. But in the early 1990s we lost over 500,000 jobs.”

Owning a home to call your own is still the American dream. Many first-time home buyers find themselves in the frustrating situation of discovering that the amount of home they can afford may not be all that they had hoped for. There’s nothing more depressing than calling a real estate agent, telling them your budget and what type of home you’d like to buy for that price, and then having them laugh at you and then explain what you can really afford. While some home buyers accept defeat and settle for less, many others have found a market that allows them to purchase homes below market value, getting them much more home for their money than the traditional methods of finding a home. Many first time home buyers are discovering the foreclosure home market.

As with any high-dollar market, the real estate market has its bargains as. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look. Foreclosure properties offer first-time home buyers (and seasoned home buyers, as well) a way to acquire their homes at incredible prices, sometimes saving as much as 30% to 50% on the price of their home. Some properties can be purchased for half of their market value. Up until recently, the hard part of purchasing these homes was finding foreclosures that were available for sale.

Before the Internet explosion, finding foreclosure homes meant buying expensive lists or knowing someone with inside information. Today that’s all been changed. Websites like www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com maintain databases of thousands of foreclosure homes and allow home buyers to search by state and zip code, zeroing in on their target area. The search results provide potential home buyers with details about the foreclosure homes that meet their criteria, such as how many bedrooms and bathrooms the home has, what the price of the home is, who to contact for information about the home, and sometimes the address and a photo are provided as well.

In addition to cost savings, first-time home buyers can benefit from the financing perks that are sometimes offered by governmental agencies and banks that have repossessed properties that need to be sold. Oftentimes, these buyers can finance their purchases with little money out of pocket and at reduced interest rates. When a bank forecloses on a property, they call it “real estate owned” or REO. These REO homes are often offered substantially below market value. It is not uncommon for banks to offer financing with no points, low loan costs and no prepayment penalties on their REO homes when they finance them.

While the traditional methods of purchasing real estate do serve certain purposes, many home buyers, especially first-time home buyers, can be better served utilizing the resources of a site like www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com. Buying a home for thousands less than market value can help these home buyers into the type of homes that they could not otherwise afford.