I’m a huge Will Smith fan. I really admire what he has done and how he has grown from his start as a rapper to a fantastic actor and obviously great person. In the following video are some excerpts from various interviews he has done over the years that provide you with some insights into how and why he has become who he has become.

His positive outlook, his drive and his motivation are a great example of what you can do if you set your mind to it and have the right attitude. If you want to move to the next level in whatever you do, perhaps this little bit of inspiration will help.

I’ve recently been emailing back and forth with a reader who has some dreams and finding this video seems to be a rather nice coincidence. Big J, pay special attention to the last 40 seconds and may the chocolate gods smile on you!

I found this originally on Frank Kern’s site, so Kudos’s to him for posting it.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks preparing another of our rental properties for sale and I was handed another reminder of why tenants are not a landlord’s friend. I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, I am not saying you cannot be friendly and I am not saying you need to create a hostile environment, but you do need to remember a landlord/tenant relationship is a business arrangement.

The Tale of Two Tenants

So, in this property one of the tenants had been with us for almost three years. During this time we had some hiccups, they had fallen behind a few times, managed to catch up, fallen behind again due to the economy and both being laid off, and then eventually caught up again. I even took them to the RTDRS to protect myself, but recommended a Cinderella or Stay order so they could be put on a payment plan rather than a straight eviction which I could easily have obtained. According to any definition, I went above and beyond to help them.

These particular tenants had a couple of dogs as we allowed pets in this property. We had run into some issues during their stay as we had a yard service come through and cut the lawns on a weekly/biweekly basis as there would be evidence of the dogs on the lawn (I will let you figure that out). In these cases, the lawn folks would do the front and leave the back, pretty simple really.

Anyway, now they are gone, they found an incredible opportunity to move to an acreage for less rent and off they went. It was all pretty quick, they gave me about two weeks notice and they actually didn’t even catch up on the money they were behind until after they were out and it involved applying the security deposit to make it balance. For the record, this is not how a landlord should ever use the damage deposit, but this is an example of being too friendly with tenants and should be taken as a lesson.

So once they were gone, I do the tour (no exit walk through as per our systems, once again when you don’t follow your systems, you lose money!) and find the place is looking rough. No, it’s not vandalized; it just wasn’t kept up that well. There is the little stuff, like the dust on the fan blades in the living room that looks like feathers on the edges it’s so thick, the ripped and torn screens on the windows and the patio possibly from the dogs looking out. There are the dust bunnies that are lying in the corners, hanging from the ceiling and on every cold air intake and fan. The sign that it has been months or possibly even years since a good cleaning was done behind furniture and it has only become apparent once furniture was removed from the property.

Then there are slightly more annoying things, like the three kitchen knobs broken off or missing, the myriad of wall anchors and dents in the walls that need patching, the missing and removed closet doors. Finally, there is the badly worn hardwood floor that needs refinishing due to possibly a rocking chair with a nail or staple that dug into the floor damaging it quite severely along with a myriad of scratch marks throughout the floor from animals and moving furniture. Oh and I mustn’t forget the large burn mark on the deck railing (the deck needs to be replaced anyway, but still).

I’ve already spent about fifteen hours patching and painting walls, I’ve brought a contractor in to get the entire front deck replaced, new windows are on order and I am preparing to get the entire floor refinished and as I am doing all of this, I have plenty of time to reflect. Especially as I paint, and it hit me the one day, this is not how a friend would leave your place. At least a friend you want to keep.

Tenants as a generality are just renting space, they get to move on and leave the wealthy landlord (whether he is wealthy or just scraping by, he owns property so renters like to assume he is wealthy) with the place when they move on. I’m not saying all tenants are like this, but I am reminding you of why you need to treat it like a business, and as a counter point let’s look at tenant number two!

The Other Tenant

So now, I am onto the tenants in the lower suite of the same property. These folks moved to Alberta a year ago from Ontario and owned their own home, but weren’t going to purchase here yet until they determined it was where they wanted to be.

During the time they were with us, they never missed a payment or fell behind. They called us a couple of times when there were any property problems and updated us right away so we were able to send out the necessary repair people or take appropriate actions to remedy the problems before they became serious. When their lease was coming up, they gave us two months notice they were moving as their job was located in the deep South and the property was in the NW. The commute was killing them, although they loved the suite, so moving made perfect sense.

When I arrived to do the exit walk through, the place was virtually spotless, not a burnt out light in the place, and the battery was even working in the smoke detector (not so true upstairs as they had removed the battery there!). The only problem was a couple of large anchors in the wall in one room where they had attached part of a desk. In comparison to the upstairs unit that was insignificant!

Comparison Time, What Was The Difference?

So what was the difference, or differences? Well the lower tenants had owned their own home and I have to assume took more responsibility for their place. The upper tenants had become “friends” (not the type I invite over for dinner or call to chat with, but possibly more the type who take advantage of you once or twice before you push them away) and possibly felt I could take care of their mess.

They were done with the space and simply wanted away, so they left. With the damage deposit applied as rent, I had no payments from them at a minimum of a thousand dollars of cleanup, wall repairs and painting. It’s true that I would have painted anyway after having a tenant in for that long, but it’s the tenant’s responsibility to leave the property in the same shape as they originally occupied it.

The Lesson

You really have to focus on your business as a landlord. When you let relationships get in the way of business, it can cost you money. Sure times have been tough the last couple of years for people, but if you let your tenants get to close, times can be tough for you too as you take responsibility for their actions, or lack of actions. There has to be a line between helping people out and ensuring you and yours are taken care of. Sometimes it’s a fine line, other times it can be very definitive, it depends on your emotional makeup to a degree, but remembering this is a business can hopefully help you ensure you are standing on the correct side of the fine line! It comes down to this, tenants are not your friends, they are your business partner in a rental property and you need to treat them as this.

Have any of you tried to help someone who was a tenant? Or do you feel a tenant took excessive advantage of you? Share some of your stories here to help remind others of where that line is. I look forward to hearing from you.

Think about that one for a moment, money makes Real Estate investing easy. When Karen and I started out, we had a small line of credit, a bit of cash saved up and some huge goals. Along the way, we created bigger piles of cash, extended lines of credit and created even larger goals, but it wasn’t always easy.

When we look back at those initial purchases, many months were a struggle, every purchase a creative process to stretch our dollars and expand our portfolio. We delved into vendor take back mortgages to learn how to reduce the amount of cash we needed. We came up with ideas to extend closing periods and obtaining early access to properties to get a head start on renovation projects. We leveraged our credit cards and other people’s money (OPM) to extend our ability to purchase new properties.

Along with this we learned about joint venture partners, hard money with obscene interest rates, RRSP second mortgages that we could apply to our properties and pay investors double digit interest rates and short term higher interest loans. We also became adept at educating friends and family about how they could utilize their own lines of credit to obtain returns of 10% or higher from us.

We continued this way for the first several years and as the market values increased and our hard work eventually started paying off, we saw more and more money start to fill our bank accounts. As quickly as the money would come in though, we would turn it back into back into more properties. Eventually as the money continued to flow in, it became easier and easier to make more money in Real Estate and to purchase property without being as creative.

2006 and 2007 were very heady times. It seemed no matter what you bought, no matter how slow your renovations, no matter how you set up your financing, it became too easy to make money. With values going up several percent per month if you couldn’t get contractors in quickly it just meant more back end profit as values increased. You didn’t have to work at buying smart, you just had to buy.

You didn’t need to be creative with vendor take back mortgages, you didn’t really need extended closing times, and it simply became easier and easier to buy just with money alone. Now, here we are several years later and many of the rules have been reset back to our starting days and perhaps even a bit further back!

The last couple of years have put a severe dent on the entire market and have managed to turn Real Estate into much more of a challenge for many people. We’ve seen deflating prices, the uncertainty of the economy and certainly a significant amount of fear in the market. The easy money has certainly disappeared.

All of this change though has created a new environment of opportunity for many investors out there and as one of my earlier posts mentioned; many new investors are starting to appear, eager to get into the Real Estate business. A majority of these folks will be coming in with lofty ambitions and some optimistic goals. I’m here to say with the proper amount of work and determination thrown in these same types of successes can be recreated by anyone.

Sure having access to cash makes it easier, but if it was easy, everyone would do it!

With the recent headlines about the new mortgage rules you may have thought there were going to be some sweeping changes, fortunately these changes have only resulted in minor tightening.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here are the changes the Finance Minister has implemented. The biggest change will be that consumers will need to qualify for five year fixed rates even if applying for a lower interest variable rate or lower shorter term rate. This is an effort to protect consumers from rising interest rates, although from recent statistics, it appears 76% of Canadians who acquired mortgages in the last six months are currently locking in 5 year rates already. So this will have relatively little impact.

Another change of note, when refinancing consumers will now only be able to refinance up to 90% of the homes current value versus the former 95%. This is meant to protect ourselves from turning our homes into ATM’s which occurred heavily in the US where homeowners were using equity in their homes to finance their lifestyle, trips and vehicles. This is a wise move as it will protect some consumers from potential financial disaster.

The last major change is non-owner-occupied properties will require a minimum 20% down payment. This ranges from rental properties to properties which are intended to be flipped. For the majority of investors who purchase rentals, this will be nothing new as typically anything financed higher than 80% results in properties that don’t properly cash flow anyway. Its main intent though is to reduce speculators who purchase property with the only goal being appreciation from overheating the markets. In my opinion, this could have the most affect on prices over the next couple of years in several cities. Notably those with very active condo markets.

Previously there had been talk of increasing the minimum down payment required for purchasers and even a shortening of the amortization period of a mortgage, but neither of these came true. This is most likely the biggest positive for prospective new homeowners. They will still only require a 5% down payment, but with the tighter qualifying, they now have to be able to afford potentially higher five year term payments.

If the new changes had included an increased down payment amount this would have blocked out a significant number of potential homebuyers from entering the market as they would have to wait until their saving essentially doubled. The double whammy would have been shortening amortization periods from the current maximum of 35 years back down to 25 years.

This would have pushed affordability completely out of the window for a much larger group of individuals and would have led to a much longer term stagnation in the housing markets. Wisely this time, the government only implemented a couple of measures to curb the market versus completely stifling it.

Our current economic recovery depends largely on the housing markets to continue to grow as Real Estate creates everything from service jobs to construction jobs which help continue to stimulate the economy. The housing market is so tightly tied into economic recovery that anything to aggressive could have easily led us back into a recession, so thankfully with these minor changes we should continue to see our continued economic recovery and continued growth in residential values.

With today’s update on the changes to mortgages for homeowners this is plenty of questions forming about what is happening in the Real Estate markets. Is the current situation the start of a bubble? Are we getting into danger where housing prices will reset again?

What we all have to remember is there is no right answer to this. Canada is a very large country and the market in Vancouver is entirely different than the markets in Hamilton or Windsor. Unfortunately the headlines cover the averages or the markets in the larger centers such as Toronto, or Vancouver.

These averages tend to be exaggerated by the size of the larger markets as well so when Toronto increases it weighs much more in the stats than when Windsor prices decrease. As an investor, or a homeowner, you have to consider where you are in the country and what is happening in your area over the next five years.

Real Estate is a longer term play and this is why it can be so important to pick an area with a better long term outlook like Alberta. Below is a great interview wih Don Campbell talking about the “housing bubble”.

One great point he makes are about the amount of five year mortgages that have been signed over the last six months and how these folks will be protected by any interest rate hikes coming in the near future, at least for now!

Here is the link, enjoy, Don Campbell BNN  Interview about the Housing Bubble in Canada

I get an email out of the blue from someone I hadn’t had contact with in the last several years (other than asking to be removed from the blog as it didn’t interest him anymore),  looking for some information on what to do with his property as he is getting transferred out of the province. He is inquiring about whether doing a rent to own is worth it or whether he should sell it, or whether I wish to purchase it as an investment property.

But I have a couple of problems, last time I helped him out with some Real Estate information, roughly three years ago, I recall him taking my info using it and then the feeling I get was of being tossed aside once he had the info. The second problem is prior to that he had become very interested in potentially investing with us in some property. After providing him with plenty of info on our projects then, spending time explaining how it worked etcetera, he bailed on that as well.

So after putting in several hours I’m left feeling a tad unappreciated, as if I have wasted my time and I’m generally not happy with the guy. So, even as we start emailing I am coming into this with a bit of a tainted mindset! So the question is, am I going into this with clouded judgment from the get go?

Hey, I love helping people out and I have been informed by several of my entrepreneurial friends that I may be giving to much information away that I have spent years learning. My last reply to the fellow was rather short, some quick answers on whether the property would work as a rental and an offer to help set up the rent to own paperwork in a way that protects him and creates the best possible setup of the deal for him. I also explained I have spent thousands of dollars in training and many hours of real life experience learning this, so I would need to be compensated if that was the route he wished to pursue.

Part of his reply; I was looking for some friendly advice and support not a service. He has decided he will do his own research on the rent to own. This brings about my question, was I being fair, or was I being a jerk?

At what point does the free information I provide cross the border and move into a chargeable service territory? Did my previous experiences with this individual push me to the dark side in an effort just to get rid of him, or was I entirely valid charging someone looking for specific information that I just happen to have considerable experience with?  What would any of you done?

I originally wrote about some possible pending changes coming to the current MLS system for my Chestermere Anchor Real Estate column back in December and suddenly other folks are starting to get on the bandwagon. I am including it below, along with another Don Campbell interview where he talks a bit more about what is going on. You need Flash installed to listen to the video, enjoy!

Do you think realtor’s commissions are excessive? Well a pending settlement between the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) and the Competition Bureau of Canada may change all of that.

Currently under CREA’s rules, a realtor licensed to work under their umbrella acts as the sales agent for the seller during the entire period of the listing contract on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system and will receive and present all offers that come in to the seller.  For this service they are able to charge a commission which is usually 7% of the first $100,000 of the sale and 3% of everything above that price. The Competition Bureau finds this to be a rather restrictive model for consumers and limits the scope of alternative business models. In essence, they are saying that the MLS is a monopoly and consumers don’t have any other real options.

So what does this mean for someone selling his or her home in the near future? The settlement is still being worked on, but it appears the biggest upcoming change is the potential buyer’s agent will be able to negotiate directly with the homeowner and bypass the listing realtor. Since the listing realtor may be in the position of only posting the property on the service and not being required to provide any additional services, this could open up a whole bevy of new discount realtors and additional charges for add on services.

The majority of the top realtors these days have complete marketing programs to help increase exposure and traffic to the properties they have available for sale. This is all included in their commissions and is why they have become so successful. Unfortunately, many less successful realtors have very little knowledge in how to properly market properties and depend more on just getting the property listed so other realtors can bring buyers in.

With the potential changes, this could cut out many realtors from the full commissions they are accustomed to and depend on to operate. The most likely change is a new fixed fee just to list the property on the MLS and additional fees attached depending on the marketing and services attached by the listing realtor. How and what levels these services will be set at could open up an entirely new arena of competition for realtors.

We could see homeowners having to choose between full marketing plans, to partial marketing plans and everything in between. It may even lend itself to perhaps a la carte programs where someone could get charged per open house or per showing by the listing realtor. These of course are on the far end of the spectrum and by the time everything is settled between the two groups there may be agreed upon levels of performance that must be met or some type of tiered service program.

In whatever manner it eventually plays out it will definitely change the landscape for homeowners and buyers in the marketplace. More options, more potential pitfalls for inexperienced sellers or buyers and a new setting for increased competition amongst realtors.

The Don Campbell interview

Wow, after what seemed like forever (at least to me) I managed to get the blog back up and running. Not sure what exactly happened, might have been the host changing some servers around, may have been a plugin for Wordpress not playing nice, but I’m back.

The boring part is I am much more adept now with the wp-config files, changing passwords and user names in a MySQL database and doing general blog troubleshooting. Also on the positive side I do have a backup of everything, but if I had to restore it would have been days before I would be back up, so thanks to figaro and his great videos walking folks through “error establishing a database connection” headaches. You probably don’t want to follow the link unless you have a blog and want some technical info on fixing database problems, but it’s there if you do!

Also, thanks to everyone who emailed me to tell me about the problem!

I’ve been off the posting wagon here for the last little bit and haven’t put anything up new for a whole week, don’t worry, I haven’t disappeared, I’ve just been busy. It appears that over the last month, more and more people are getting on the Real Estate bandwagon and this has taken some of my time up.

We have met with six different sets of people who are starting to get the Real Estate bug and have either been referred to us as people who are easy to talk to and helpful. It’s great to see the enthusiasm from people out there just looking to get started and it helps to light a little bit of a fire under us as well.

If you have just been lurking on the pages and reading along, it’s really not a problem contacting us if you ever have questions. I try to answer everyone’s questions and perhaps I meet with too many people, but it’s all working out so far. Some of you are already starting to read some of these posts and adding to some of the discussions with your comments and observations which I really appreciate.

If you have any topics you would like me to touch on here send me an email or a comment and I will do my best to provide you with some helpful information to guide you along.

I have a few topics to cover all of a sudden and after an email from a subscriber last week, I will start with spam.

Strangely enough, when people subscribe to the blog, they get updates on new posts. True I filled in many of you automatically from my contacts when I first started up the blog, and many have requested to be removed over the years, but many have also been added on, my statistics show me that many of you read them and some never read them. Also, there have been a few glitches, where people received the same blog posting email two, three or four times and I apologize for that. Technology isn’t perfect, we all seem to understand that, we resent it, but we understand it, or at least I hope we all do?
Anyway, I have previously updated people on how to be removed, and it’s simple, just email me and ask to be removed. My point here is don’t be surprised if you register and get emails from me, really what did you think you were registering for? Sending me an email saying Stop The Spam is not necessarily the correct tact. Don’t worry, if you do, you won’t be getting anymore of the updates as soon as I can get to this computer and delete you, so on that account I guess it is effective. Anyway, there is that little rant, thank you for following along.

Rich Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, if you haven’t heard of him you haven’t looked at your front door in the last year or read any of the junk mail you receive from the post office. Rich Dad Poor Dad endorses a series of seminar’s that appear around the country and show you how to become wealthy. Or at least that is the premise of why you should attend.

Recently, CBC’s Marketplace had an expose on the seminars which you can watch here, Who’s getting rich off Rich Dad? Anyone considering attending one of these to become wealthy really should watch this. Now having said that, I am a big believer in the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of books and the concept Richard Kiyosaki is pushing. It has changed our lives definitely for the better.

You just have to take much of it with a grain of salt. Some of the techniques they talk about may or may not work. Mobile homes scare the hell out of me, they are a depreciating asset much like a vehicle and are not really Real Estate and it appears may not be as profitable as portrayed (you need to watch the video to understand). On the other hand, we have managed to make a considerable amount of money off of pre-foreclosures over the years, but it isn’t necessarily easy!

I really believe it’s true that anyone can become rich, but there is far more to becoming rich than just going to one of these seminars and then signing up for more and expensive courses as these types of seminars are famous for. To really become successful, you really have to buy into the idea that you can do anything you set your mind to, to find a real purpose that drives you. Yet the mindset of many of the folks attending these types of events is to attend the course, discover the secret code of the wealthy and watch their life change. Kind of like getting the winning lottery ticket, which is the ultimate seminar that people keep signing up for on a weekly basis.

I’ve actually attended some of the events like this and there is nothing you get from them that you cannot find in many of the books out there, except for the opportunity to meet many other people looking to change their lives. The opportunity to hang around like minded people, how golden is that?

We even started out by attending a three day weekend event that cost us $5,000. Sure enough, they had a few people selling things and surprise, we bought into several of them, but that was when we were just searching for the winning lottery ticket. We weren’t quite sure where we wanted to go, how we were going to get there and what it was going to look like. We just knew we were going to become rich through Real Estate.

Since that time we have learned a tad bit more, attended a few more events, and put a few miles on in the Real Estate business and the game of life. We have learned to plan a bit better (we still need plenty of work on this), we have seen how setting goals for ourselves works and more importantly how not setting goals provides you with exactly what you planned for. We have even met some people who have become great friends and inspirations for us. So is there a lesson buried in here about seminars, or is this another rant?

As much as I like to ramble, there is a point, the seminars may not be the answer for you, but they could be the catalyst to help you move forward. It could be that one ingredient to help push you to look for more answers and more solutions to get what you want or perhaps it allows you to meet the one person who can help guide you along. Most importantly, that solution may not involve the $5,000 three day course that you can purchase from the back of the room, or perhaps it does, it all depends on where you are in your life.

Perhaps many of you remember the book and the video called The Secret? It was all the rage and applauded by many as the ticket to changing your life. Unfortunately, too many people took the boiled down message to mean sit at home and focus on what you want in life and it will come true. Needless to say many people were very disappointed in the results as they were missing one of the key ingredients, taking action.

What are your thoughts? Have you attended any of these events and if so, did it work for you?

I follow a fellow by the name of Bill Gray who is known as “The Landlord Doctor”. He is a seasoned debt collector and has some great advice about screening tenants in the following article. I’ve mentioned some of this previously, but it’s always great to get a fresh perspective.

Screening Tenants – Don’t Miss an Important Component to Screening New Tenants

Be sure to check out some of his other great articles as well.

I just finished a very interesting book called Socialnomics by Erik Qualman that covers how social media is transforming everything we do these days. If you haven’t been paying attention social media (or Web 2.0 as it is also known) is about how the internet is changing from companies simply throwing up an online brochure and calling it a webpage, to companies and individuals now having Facebook Fanpages and company Twitter accounts.
The statistics on the number of users on Facebook is absolutely staggering and it continues to grow at an amazing rate. This evolution of the internet away from a webpage, or perhaps more accurately in companionship with a regular webpage, to Facebook pages is part of the transition that is occurring from both marketing and social aspects.
The friends you have on Facebook become part of your social circle now whether they are next door or across the globe, and this social network influences you whether you are aware or not. If you are currently on Facebook, you are already barraged by friends who have joined a group or a page and want you to join as well. More often than not, many of their other friends do as well all creating a great marketing and social environment.
Twitter too many, is just a confusing fad. A stream of information telling you what someone you don’t care about is doing. For others it is a new faster streamlined way for friends and associates to stay in touch, for businesses to keep their pulse on what the people are saying about them, or even a way to start an online conversation with potential new friends. It’s all what you make of it, but whatever you make of it, this is only the beginning.
If you are interested in finding out more about social media and what you may expect to see coming (or already occurring) in the future definitely check this book out, Socialnomics – how social media transforms the way we live and do business – Eric Qualman.

If you are currently using Twitter, follow along with me, http://twitter.com/billbiko

The Winnipeg based Frontier Centre released it’s report on housing affordability recently and proclaimed Calgary was ranked 23rd out of the 28 cities in their affordability index. The number one cities for affordability were Windsor and Thunder Bay.

Can anyone read between the lines here? At first glance this would suggest Calgary wouldn’t be the place to move to, but if you are looking for work, don’t you want to go where the jobs are? Perhaps there is a reason Windsor is so affordable, everyone is leaving as all the automaker jobs are drying up, so all the values are dropping. The future for Thunder Bay isn’t to glittering either.

Calgary, although unemployment is way up, still has significantly better opportunities for the people vacating other economically depressed areas. Even more importantly, the jobs also pay considerably more here, we have no PST and over all aren’t we just nicer people?

The study actually covered 272 cities worldwide and not surprisingly Vancouver topped the list as the least affordable.

The link to the full story is available here, Frontier Center – How Affordable is Your Housing?. Just remember, affordability doesn’t directly relate to desirability to live there. There are always additional economic and emotional reasons for certain locations to be more costly to live and these can be incredibly difficult to measure.

I had hoped to have my eviction package all complete by now, but time has managed to get away from me and the project keeps expanding. Currently I am just finishing page four of the outline up, I already have about a dozen pages written and I have ideas for about a dozen more! My original deadline of December 31st is long past, but I will keep working away.

I was just checking some of the stats earlier today and I have had over 300 hits on the blog all directly related to evictions in Alberta. Obviously people are looking for information, I might as well be the one to supply it! If I have helped you previously with an eviction, or you have suggestions about what to include, I would love to hear from you so I can help guide the next person in a similar situation.

My goal is for the completed work to have the whole process covered from whether you need to provide a 14 day eviction notice to the final steps to regaining possession of your property from a tenant.

In previous articles, I have mentioned it is too early to jump into the US housing market unless you have a very long term plan. This latest article in Business Week seems to concur with my thoughts.

2009 was a record year for foreclosures in the US with an increase in the number of foreclosures of 21% versus 2008 and they believe 2010 will be worse. The majority of this is all related to the adjustable rate mortgages resetting to higher interest rates causing payments to increase on many properties by double or more.

With any equity in the property wiped out, it doesn’t make sense for many homeowners to continue to make payments on a house they owe $100,000 or more above its actual value. With the ability in the US for mortgage holders to just walk away from this loss without the lender being able to come after them, it is exactly what they are doing.

So what does this mean to potential buyers? Well, as more of these foreclosed properties hit the market it will continue to drag prices downward, or at the very least leave prices very flat until all the inventory burns through and demand ramps up. So while that four bedroom home just outside Phoenix with the pool sounds like a bargain now at $200,000, in six months it may be more of a bargain.

You can read the full article here, Foreclosures: An Increase of 21% in 2009 and Climbing