Hi,
I lived in and made California my primary investing market for 25 years!
There is a very broad market in California, you have neighborhoods with multi million dollar homes and neighborhoods with homes selling for less than a hundred thousand, the key is finding what your buyers are looking for, for this it takes working like a detective to dig up the leads to properties your buyers have interest in!
Right now California is one of the states experiencing high foreclosure rates, because of this delema most available properties in the Market will be “Short Sales”, “Foreclosure Sales”, “REO’s” and “Property Disposition Auctions”.
Now I used to live in Newport Beach, I always thought there are great properties in Corona Del Mar, Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, Mission Viejo, Lake Forest and the Anaheim Hills. There some great properties here and certainly three million dollar homes you could buy today for one million three hundred thousand.
But the reality is your buyers are probable looking for middle class properties, the ones in Garden Grove, Anaheim, Huntington Beach, Orange and Fullerton. These homes are older, more affordable and presumeable more foreclosures happening by numbers in the middle class properties than in the upper class properties.
Just like Florida, Arizona and Nevada; California has lenders that have to move properties, and just like these other markets you may have to make 30 or 40 offers or more to just get one excepted! You may have to work a short sale for months to get one excepted on a property that may need more work than a conventional buyer may desire to do, and the competition for REO’s is fierce, although if you run comps you will find a lot of REO properties offered for far less than the actual FMV or ARV because they need moderate to major rehab.
Properties are available at foreclosure sales and at property disposition auctions, however you will need all cash to buy through these avenues, but put together a bunch of people with extra money who would like to earn more than 1/2 of 1% interest and pool some funds and you could have the cash buy properties through this avenue!
I used to drive neighborhoods when I had time, “Driving for Dollars” can be fun and enlightening on a sunday afternoon, grab your wife and take a pleasant afternoon drive, just don’t take her into bad area’s like Watts, South Central and some other area’s high in drug and gang activity!
Right now there are probable only a couple of conventional sellers to every 10 homes in the market as depressed prices drive potential sellers to wait until markets come back to sell there home.
GR