All Forum Posts by: William Longley

Originally posted by Tracey Williams:

I just want to add that the Library is a great source of information for starters like us.


I once paid for a "guru program" and that's all it was. nothing to gain!!!

I just read "think & Grow Rich" and I got it from the Library.

BP is a great place to be!!!

Thanks to you all!!!!

I remember reading about 'Think & Grow Rich' while in college. If I remember correctly the author studied a bunch of successful people and comments on their shared traits and ideologies. I'll definitely pick it up on the way home today.

Also, thanks for the reminder on what a great resource the library can be.

Originally posted by Ted Akers:

Yes, welcome to another addition to the Denver BP Cartel. I have used a scraping software and am interested in hearing about progress on yours.

I actually wrote a custom library to scrape websites with Firefox. It's a ruby library relying on selenium. Kind-of nerdy, but fun. Another developer I worked with, Mikkel Garcia, is maintaining it at http://github.com/mikkel/razor if anyone is interested.

Originally posted by "Jon Holdman":

...
I'm also a software engineer, though more recently its been more and more hardware. Real estate seems to appeal to engineering types.

Thanks for letting me know about the Denver group - also it's nice to see another software engineer on the forums.

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone!

Hi BiggerPocketters,

I'm newish to this forum (long time lurker), and work as a software engineer. I'm 26 and looking for my first piece of real estate - hopefully a foreclosed property in the Denver, Colorado area. To help with that, I've created a website that scrapes REOs and plots them on a map and I hope to share it with everyone later.

I think it's great that yall are willing to share your expertise and advice so openly, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot from this community.

-William

Paying all cash also opens up new investment opportunities. Foreclosure auctions, for instance, are usually cash-only affairs.

I'd stick to learning about the business before putting your neck out and attempting to change the business model, especially in this economy. One wrong move with someone else's money could mean bankruptcy.

Originally posted by Ted Akers:

This guy called the housing bubble prior to the bust and is saying here that those calling for a housing recovery are not paying attention to what is in front of their eyes.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/housing-bulls-are-%22not-paying-attention%22-to-the-facts-says-dean-baker-483703.html?tickers=xhb,^dji,^gspc,xlf,tlt,tbt

This link is extremely relevant to what we will be experiencing in the next few years. There will be a snowball effect where ARM resets / unemployment / a huge variety of other factors will continue to cause foreclosures which will cause housing prices to drop. This in turn will cause strategic defaults, and this is all without interest rates rising.

Hopefully I'm wrong - but I doubt we will be done with the housing crisis any time soon.