Wink News Story
(8/09) 
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New Press Release
(7/09)
The Foreclosure Shoppe, LLC
8911 Daniels Center Drive, Suite 206
Fort Myers, FL 33912
239.728.3320
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Gina Howard, The Foreclosure Shoppe, 239.246.4590
Tina Haisman, APR, CPRC, 239.292.2882
Crazy Foreclosure Guy Buys House for $1,000
A Fort Myers based foreclosure investment expert recently purchased a home for only $1,000 at auction. The huge growth in foreclosures in this country has catapulted the profitability of the foreclosure industry. Are foreclosures the hottest investment trend?
FORT MYERS, FL (July 14, 2009) Tom Bruzzesi, who owns The Foreclosure Shoppe, a foreclosure investment business in Southwest Florida, is known in Lee County as the “Crazy Foreclosure Guy.” He buys foreclosed properties at auction and flips them for enviable profits. His most recent score was a home he won at auction for only $1,000.
“That’s unheard of,” Bruzzesi says. “Most people spend more than that on their monthly mortgage payments.”
He bought the 1,300 square foot Lehigh Acres home on Feb. 25, performed no repairs, and hired Broker Salesman Charlie Bonacolta of Realty World, who sold it for $18,000 on March 13.
After commission, Bruzzesi netted approximately $14,000 on the deal. That’s a 1,400 percent return in only 16 days. Zillow.com reports the value of the home to be $88,500.
Aside from this $1,000 home, the least expensive price Bruzzesi ever paid for a home was $5,700 in 2007.
What’s his secret? “I am the prepared investor. I’ve been doing this for over 6 years, every day, and have purchased over 600 properties. I do my research,” he said. “The opportunities are out there. You just have to know how to find them and be prepared for them as they arise.” Bruzzesi and his staff research 40 – 50 properties a day.
Before making a purchase, Bruzzesi does a tremendous amount of research for each individual property. “That is the secret of being a prepared investor.”
“The historical meltdown in the financial markets and the resulting huge growth in foreclosures in this country is the talk of the nation,” he said. “The time for foreclosure investment is ripe, and the deals are definitely out there.”
However, Bruzzesi is not looking to keep this knowledge all to himself. He plans to announce foreclosure seminars in the near future to help educate other potential investors about how to get ahead in the foreclosure business. “I’d like to share my expertise to help other people get in on the game. Who wants to be a prepared investor?”
For more information, visit www.theforeclosureshoppe.com.
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Tom Bruzzesi |
News Press Article
Monday, May 5, 2008
It's a place where homes can sometimes be purchased at bargain prices.
But don't expect to get Sanibel on a Lehigh Acres budget, and you could lose your shirt if you don't know what you're doing.
That's true in part because there's a small but intense group of guys with nicknames such as "The Whisperer" and "The Maniac" who do know what they're doing and don't mind eating your lunch for you. Or each other's lunch, for that matter.
Welcome to "the courthouse steps," a corner of the second floor of the Lee County Courthouse where the county clerk's office holds auctions, as required by law, at 11 a.m. every weekday in cases where a judge has ordered that a piece of property be sold to satisfy an unpaid debt.
It's a busy place, and on the brink of getting a lot busier.
Foreclosures in recent months have skyrocketed as banks take back houses whose owners can't or won't continue making the payments because values have fallen. Judges in March ordered 521 properties sold - more than 19 times as many as the 27 from March 2006.
Most of those will end up as auction sales.
Lee Clerk of the Court Charlie Green said he’s about to step up the
auctions, which disposed of more than 70 properties one day last month.
“We’ll have days in the future when we’ll have two sales,” Green said.
What’s frightening is that a huge backlog of foreclosure cases is building
up and needs to be dealt with: almost 16,000 were still pending at the end
of March, he said.
The court system is preparing, Green said. Three retired judges, who are
paid $350 a day, were hired in April to help deal with the caseload.
'My type of market’
Most of the properties auctioned these days are simply taken back by
the lender if nobody else’s bid reaches the minimum the lender is willing
to accept.
As a result, more and more homes are ending up owned by the bank: 838
homes by the end of 2007, or 0.4 percent of the total in Lee County,
according to San Francisco-based First American CoreLogic Inc.
Back in the heady days of the real estate boom that ended in late 2005,
there were buyers aplenty at the auction, said David Hall, president of
First Community Bank of Southwest Florida.
“They were buying into a buying frenzy,” he said. “There were not that
many for sale.”
But now there’s a glut of homes on the market, Hall said. “There’s just so
much property out there.”
Banks generally are setting the minimum winning bid at far above the real
market price of the houses, said Jeff Tumbarello, a mortgage broker and
investor who sometimes participates in the auction.
“A lot of them are now lower than the judgment but not significantly lower
to get someone off the fence,” he said.
As a result, a small group of experienced bidders dominates the auctions,
and they tend to like it that way.
“This is my type of market,” said Thomas Bruzzesi of Thomas Realty &
Investments, who has been a real estate investor since 1989. “Everybody’s
hibernating. They’re not educated for this market.”
At a recent auction with about a dozen people in attendance, an obvious
novice made a $20,000 bid on a condominium being taken back by a bank.
Bruzzesi quickly bid the price up to $80,000 — out of range for the
wannabe hoping to get a steal. The bank bought it back with the next bid
at $81,000.
Bruzzesi said he was just saving everybody a lot of time. He already knew
the bank was never going to let the condo go at anything close to market
price so there was no point in a long, involved bidding war.
“We call Tom ‘The Maniac,’” chuckled his competitor, Charles Cosby of The
Foreclosure Team Inc., after the auction, and Bruzzesi happily admitted
he’s ultra-competitive.
Cosby, a quiet, constantly smiling man, is known as “The Whisperer”
because of his low-key manner.
He gently warned a woman watching the auction and considering making a bid
that it’s not a game for the fainthearted or unprepared.
“I’d never advise a normal person to come here as a hobby,” Cosby said.
“To walk up here without a lot of experience is dangerous.”
Bruzzesi explained that to bid intelligently, you must know what other
debts are secured by the property.
He once watched an inexperienced bidder triumphantly pick up a house for
$12,000 and later realize to his chagrin that there was also a $168,000
mortgage on it — the bidder’s money was down the drain.
Missing a mortgage while checking court records is the easiest thing in
the world, even for the experienced, Bruzzesi said. “You can have
something as simple as missing a unit number,” he said.
Even when the bidder gets clear title, there are no guarantees about the
condition of the property or zoning issues.
As a result, the regulars are loath to buy anything without looking at it,
although occasionally a deal comes along that’s too good to pass up.
John Carney of Carney Properties & Investment Group, for example, said he
almost never buys sight unseen but took a chance a few years ago when he
could pick up a 5,500-square-foot house in a rundown east Fort Myers
neighborhood for only $18,000.
When he walked into the house, he quickly realized why it went so cheap:
“It needed $120,000” to fix it up, Carney said.
Carney eventually sold the house for more than $200,000 and made money on
the deal, but it was a three-year project because there were few potential
buyers for its only practical use as a day-care center.
The other regulars nodded in sympathy: All had been there and done that.
Although the people who come to the auctions don’t recommend amateurs
participate, they all acknowledge that looky-loos are a great source of
potential buyers.
One recent attendee was Kim Hardin, a real estate agent with Century 21
Sunbelt Realty # 1.
She didn’t bid on any properties but was interested in buying foreclosed
houses from the regulars.
Hardin said she’s looking to buy in bulk for clients interested in holding
houses and leasing them out.
But that could be difficult, Carney said. “We can’t get the houses” in
large numbers from the banks.
Ed Bonkowski, a Fort Myers-based real estate broker, did a lot of business
in foreclosed properties in the early ’90s in the last major downturn but
said he hasn’t lately because good deals are “few and far between.”
He expects that will change eventually, as foreclosure sales accelerate
and bank-owned homes pile up.
“Our decision to buy’s going to be when the banks are ready to bulk sale a
bunch of them, then it’d make some sense,” Bonkowski said.
But prices will have to drop steeply for that to happen, he said.
“At 15 cents on the dollar, all those properties will be gobbled up,
investors will come out of the woodwork and buy them and everybody will go
back to work,” Bonkowski said.
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