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I’m pretty excited about the news of this bill that was proposed last week that will require banks to respond to short sale requests by a borrower within 75 days.

As I’m sure you know, short sales are better for a borrower than foreclosure and they can make for a great real estate investment…

But what you probably didn’t know is that short sales are much better for neighborhoods in general.  According to a release from Short Sale New England, short sales do not bring down the value of neighboring homes like foreclosures do.

The short sale process has been a source of frustration for real estate investors for a long time so I really hope this bill passes.

If it does, I predict a couple of things will happen.

First, the foreclosure inventory will dry up even faster than it is right now.  There will be even less opportunities for the average Joe investor to snag a great foreclosure property.

Second, there’s going to be a wave of short sales in the mid range homes – $250k – $500k that will probably last for 6-12 months.

There’s a couple reasons for this.  The banks have been stubborn in these price ranges because it’s not as much capital at risk as the high value homes.

Many homeowners in this range want to get out from a bad mortgage, but they are in a position where they are just getting by and stuck because the banks won’t move.  The last thing they want to do is go into foreclosure.

I think there’s a lot of great deals to be had out there when this passes and the savvy investors will gobble them up hand over fist.

My recommendation is to keep an eye out on this bill passing.  If it does, there will be prime opportunities for hard money lending that will bring incredible returns in a safe and secure manner.

If you aren’t taking advantage of opportunities that are available right now, I put together a video that shows you how you can.   Click here

Last week was a real busy week for questions and there were a ton of them that I really want to answer…

… but alas, time is not permitting.  So I struggled to pick out the one that I thought was most timely and relevant to the majority of my readers and site visitors.

And [drumroll] here it is:

“How do I package an offer for an REO property so that it will have the best chance of being accepted?”

This is an area of much frustration and confusion for many people trying to learn real estate investing. Especially right now as competition for the REOs is really heating up!

Here’s six things you can do to make your offer stand out and get accepted on REO deals:

1)  Examine the property history

Have your agent get you the bank’s purchase price on the Trustee’s Deed or Sheriff’s Deed.  Compare that price to the price the bank is asking.

Also look at the amount of the loan that was last secured to the home.

Assuming the house is under priced, the bank will accept an offer that is  between the original mortgage balance(s) and the foreclosure sale price.

2) Carefully examine the comparables

The list price usually has no bearing on the actual value of the property. In real estate a property is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.  If you have competition on this property, you can be certain others will be offering more than the list price.

To determine what this property is truly worth, you have to examine the last three months of comparables.  These must be very, very close comps too.

Look at any pending transactions of comps. Ask your agent to call the listing agents of those pending sales to try to find out the accepted offer price. You may or may not get this to work but it’s worth a shot.

3) Check out the listing agent’s recent sales

The majority of agents that do REOs work for one or two banks. And some of them list REOs exclusively. Because of this, they deal in volume and will usually apply the same pricing principles to all their REO listings.

Have your buyer’s agent to look up the listing agent in MLS and run a search on his or her name for the last 3 to 6 months of listings.

You be able to see in the history of those listings what their list-price to sales-price ratio has been.

If you see a trend in what those listings are selling at – for example: 4% over list price, then you may consider  offering 5% above the list price.

4) Submit a pre-approval letter

You can print pre-approval letters from our website 24/7 – http://www.dohardmoney.com/pre-qualification

5) Don’t ask the bank for concessions

Many people with try to get the bank to pay for inspections or repairs.  You have to remember that they are already taking a bath on these homes selling them for less than what they were owed.

Which means they take that as a slap in the face and don’t consider you to be a serious buyer.

Occasionally they will pay for repairs, but will never agree to do that at the offer stage.

If you find major problems during an inspection, you shoul renegotiate after your offer has been accepted.

6) Shorten the inspection period

Again this speaks volumes to your seriousness as a borrower.  The faster you can get things done, the more the bank will want to work with you.

There you have it – six surefire things you can do to package the best REO offer possible.  One thing I’d like to point out here is that this is a lot of work…

And several of the strategies I laid out are relying on you having a real estate agent to help you.  More importantly, this is just one piece of the puzzle too!

You still need to get access to the funding to get the deal done and you need to learn real estate rehabbing and reselling strategies too.

That’s why I’ve put together my Real Estate Millions Diamond Program.  It will give you all the training, coaching and access to financing that you need to achieve the financial freedom you are looking for through investing in real estate.

If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to check out how it can help you reach your goals:  click here

I just read this article over on DSNews.com about foreclosure sales being significantly up in the western states.  That is all of them except Washington

California, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon all saw huge increases in foreclosure sales to investors in January of 2012.

Nevada’s month over month numbers jumped 59.8% even!

Foreclosure Radar has data that shows in these same states, there has been a significant decline in foreclosure starts since October of last year.

Now if you’ve been reading my blog posts about the state of the foreclosure market, you’d be familiar with my predictions of this occurring.

The robo signing settlement from last week is just going to add fuel to the fire.  Investors are going to be cleaning up the remaining inventory of foreclosures over the course of this year.

And any thought that a significant amount of new foreclosures will hit the market this year should be discarded.

2012 is shaping up to be a monumental year for the hard money lending industry.  More and more investors are buying up property and the banks still have their purse strings pulled tight.  Especially since the biggies just had to shell out $25 billion…

Funny how the government used tax payer money to bail them out and then sued them a few years later.

Oh well, I digress.

If you like real estate, but don’t want to have all the downside involved with owning it or flipping it…

Becoming a hard money lender may be a good fit for you.

My team and I put together a new video that shows exactly how you can take advantage of this trend in real estate to get 16.32%… 18.94%… even 27.12% returns by funding short term real estate investment loans.

Click here to watch the video now