1000 BPOs completed by the Seattle Reo Team in and around Seattle Washington

1000 BPOs completed by the Seattle Reo Team in and around Seattle Washington

Yesterday we hit a milestone in the Seattle Reo Team.

We completed our 1000th BPO as a team. www.seattlereoteam.com

What is a BPO? It stands for Broker Price Opinion.

When does a bank do a BPO? Banks routinely call for them when a home defaults on payments, again when a short sale offer is made, again when it goes to foreclosure, and again before it is listed by the foreclosure listing agent. Although appraisals cost $450 - $500, the competition among real estate agents has driven the price down to $42 to $95 for a BPO. The middle men get twice that amount, but we as agents hardly get enough money to pay the costs involved.

Our 1000th BPO completed by the Seattle Reo Team. I took the pictures, made a video, and am writing a blog about it.

What this means is that this last year, the Seattle Reo Team www.seattlereoteam.com  visited and took pictures of 1000 properties.

We pulled comparables of 3000 sold properties. I got a good sense of the difference between properties that sit. And properties that sell.

There were some surprises. For example, many houses over one million are somewhere in the foreclosure process. However, for each of these homes, we always found 3 houses nearby, also over a million dollars in value, that had sold recently. Homes have been selling in every price range. In researching one of these, I discovered that someone paid over 10 million dollars for a waterfront home on Lake Washington on the Seattle side. www.philipleng.com Obviously not everyone is broke or unemployed!

My first bpo was one of the hardest. It was waterfront on Bainbridge Island. We have routinely found that doing a bpo on waterfront property ended up giving us grief. For $45 to $95 they want an evaluation comparable to the $2200 one that appraisers routinely do. We have crossed all islands off of our list for future bpo work.

We are now a team of nine. Four full time and five part time. www.seattlereoteam.com

We have had some interesting experiences. Like when Laura was chased by a man who got into his car and followed her for blocks and blocks after she took pictures of his house. Like when Annie went into a back yard to get a picture of the back of the house and people came pouring out of the house demanding to know what she was doing and why. Like when Justin was trying to get close enough to a mobile home on an acre to get a close up of the house number, and four huge dogs came flying out of the back yard to chase him. Yes, he made it to the car before they got him. But we never DID get a picture of the house numbers!

We got a lot of push back on that one. How do we know you were at the right place? We need proof that the pictures are of the right property. We told them the story. Told them that for some strange reason, we didn't feel $45 was worth risking our lives for!

1000 BPOs completed by the Seattle Reo Team in and around Seattle! Why would we do that? It is our entry into the world of listing bank owned properties. www.seatlereoteam.com

We now have one listed and four more in pre listing stage. More about that later!