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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (41738)	9/20/2005 6:11:37 PM
From: J. P.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

I've had puts on TOL for a while. Today was super because it dropped like a stone, and my puts were already in the money. Also, there is still a lot of fat on all of these (len, kbh, bzr, et al), and they are just starting their bear market. IMO, every rally in this sector is now just a chance to short at will. Short the bear markets on rallys, buy the bull market on dips. I'm finally getting through my thick skull how to play these ridiculous bubble/bubble burst sectors. The bull side does not always make sense, and it will last longer than you think, way longer, years longer than makes sense. When the bear finally starts, it's quick and vicious, and relentless. So during the bull phase, just leave common sense behind and ride the wave as long as it lasts and just use trailing stops. OK, where is the next bubble forming?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (41738)	9/20/2005 6:27:26 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Respond to of 306849

Quicker than you can say "mortgage fraud".... dispatch.com FLIPPING FRENZY Wealthy investors profit from run-down houses Tuesday, September 20, 2005 Geoff Dutton THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Flipping Frenzy Wealthy investors profit from run-down houses Tracie Simmons, 30, says she received $5,000 for signing loans to buy five vacant Columbus houses, including this one at 236 N. Monroe Ave. Now she faces fines and possible jail time for unpaid bills and code violations as a result of the deals involving a New York investment fund. Trash and thigh-high weeds surrounded the two-story blue house on E. Sycamore Street. Boards covered the first-floor windows, and those above were smashed out. More than a South Side eyesore, the house was the first of hundreds like it in Columbus to end up in a speculative New York investment portfolio for the wealthy. Savvy entrepreneurs locally and nationally squeeze big profits from Ohio’s most rundown houses in a variety of ways, sometimes leaving them abandoned. The New York fund, launched last year seeking minimum investments of $500,000, is an example of how these complicated transactions are growing more widespread and sophisticated in Ohio. They exploit weak state regulations and fuel the number of empty inner-city homes, an investigation by The Dispatch found. Stillwater Capital Partners created the fund and manages it from the firm’s Madison Avenue offices. Such investments, called hedge funds, are secretive and loosely regulated investment pools for wealthy investors trying to ‘‘hedge" against stock market swings. Sorting out the details of the convoluted transactions isn’t possible because most of the records aren’t publicly available. This much is clear: The Stillwater Asset Backed Fund since February 2004 has loaned more than $30 million, financing the buying and reselling of more than 500 vacant houses in Ohio, 390 of them in Columbus, county auditor and recorder records show. Sellers significantly marked up the price for their properties. Stillwater representatives recruited buyers, at least some of whom say they never saw the houses, and paid them $300 to $1,000 to sign for the Stillwater loans on assurances that the houses would be fixed up and resold before any payments came due. But these ‘‘straw buyers," many of them young apartment dwellers with low or moderate incomes, have been saddled with houses, unpaid tax bills and city citations for unsafe conditions at houses for which they don’t even have keys. The houses remained empty. And the hedge fund and mortgage brokers collected fees on each transaction. Stillwater officials, including the firm’s managing partners, Richard Rudy and Jack Doueck, did not return numerous telephone messages and e-mails seeking comment. The property at 1047 E. Sycamore St. is typical. ‘‘I’ve become numb to it after all these years," said neighbor Ritchy Smith, an accountant who in 1992 bought and fixed up his brick house with a porch swing, expecting a neighborhood revival. Instead, it’s gone downhill, scarred by ever more empty and dilapidated houses. ‘‘Isn’t it sad?" On the Near East Side, Freda Wyche lives two doors down from a Lilley Avenue house with a rotting second story that sags over the front porch. She raised three daughters on this once-pleasant street. Now young men skulk in and out of the abandoned duplex at odd hours. ‘‘It’s horrible," she said. ‘‘I think they use it as a drug house." It also was financed by Stillwater.<snip, rest in link>