As a property scout for a large SFR real estate investment & holding company, I get to see, feel, and touch areas of the San Francisco Bay Area I’d otherwise never see or even know existed. What brought me to this particular property was a targeted MLS search that looked interesting.
On a daily basis I scour the greater San Jose area on MLS for “deals”. Since the term, “deal” is very much in the eye of the beholder, let me first qualify what most of our clients think of as a deal. In this market it is almost always an REO, foreclosure or short sale. Typically these properties need some pretty rigorous re-hab, like $20k to $30k worth. We'll need to be able to buy it cheap enough that once we've done the necessary work, marked it up modestly, we will be able to re-sell it to an investor or owner occupied buyer for below the current market value (based on a comparable recent sale).
In this case we had an offer on a 2 bed, 1 bath accepted on a short sale for under $200k - this caught my attention. The first step was to search the entire locality over the last year for comparable sales. When I found that there had been only five sales over the last year that were even near comps, I was encouraged. Next I discovered that none of the sales were Bed/Bath & Sq.ft. matches; the property looked even better. When the closest B/B & S.Fs. were about a mile away and had sold for over $300k, I was very interested. I also discovered that two prominent high tech companies were headquartered nearby and I started thinking that this is too good to be true -something must be wrong.
Ok, maybe there was a deal-breaking element in the mix, but there was definitely enough potential to merit taking a drive. Some basic demographic research never hurts, so while I planned my trip I looked at the Wiki on the area to see what popped up. Nothing on the web brought up any red flags, in fact it looked like a really nice, small community- I even found some great lunch spots for the upcoming trip.
Sorry about the cliff-hanger, but I have to write some offers; check back soon and I'll tell you about the trip and the REO.
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