New member - title examiner eager to learn REI

[Mark Enriquez]

Hello,

I’m a title examiner working in Cuyahoga county (Cleveland). I search land records all day, and have been doing so for years with most of my work in foreclosures. Over the years I kept seeing a lot houses going to default with tons of equity, most of the time because the owner had passed, or sadly, one of the owners passed leaving someone unable to keep up with the mortgages (I’m sensitive to that, and one day I’d like to be in position to help).

Anyways, I realized I could not pursue properties that I did title work on for a paying client. But I did eventually run my own search for houses going into default, a very large scale search throughout certain areas of Cuyahoga, and I ended up finding around two hundred pre-foreclosures. I sifted through them, comparing assessed values against the foreclosure prayer amount. I looked for houses which would bring about 150k or more in equity after the auction. I found about 40 properties that met the criteria and performed title searches on them. A lot of them turned out to be upside down with the mortgage, but a good amount of the results turned out to be in default for about 20% of what the property is worth. I looked closer, and while I think some of them will be able to avoid foreclosure, a few of them might see the auction. I’m watching the court dockets, checking once a week.

After finding these seemingly awesome deals, I set out to learn as much as I can about real estate investing, and through out my online searches, biggerpockets kept popping up. I read the forums and saw a lot of knowledgeable people contributing, friendly people.

I don’t think I will know enough about investing to make a move on any of the pre-foreclosures I located, but that’s all right. Cleveland is full of distressed properties, and I’d like to help people get to a safer place in their lives while at the same time making an awesome purchase. I’ll be prepared at some point, soon hopefully.

Nice to meet you all. 

mark