See the blue car? Look close and see the man in the white shirt on the left. Here’s the story. The driver of the car and her friend were caught shoplifting up the boulevard. They ran out the door and started to speed away, but the traffic was stopped for the light. So they gassed it and tried to drive between the line of traffic and the parked cars along the curb. The space was not wide enough.They bashed into at least seven parked cars, tearing off the rear bumpers and sideswiped another string of five cars on the driver’s side. My guess is $250,000 damage in 30 seconds. But they could not get past the van pulling that red trailer. So the culprit backed up into a brand new BMW (stage right) and drove up over the median, nearly plowing over the shop-owner, who is the man in the white shirt.
What will happen to the shoplifting hit and run? Nothing, she was a black woman and need only claim she had to steal to feed her kids. I’m not racist or sexist, I’m merely stating a fact of life around here. Interestingly, nobody paid much attention to the first crash because of police policy (they conduct background investigations on all witnesses so nobody wants to get involved) but this episode was too much.
By the time I got this picture, dozens of camera phones were ahead of me and the police were on the way. Nobody was injured, but I wouldn’t say that if anybody had gotten their hands on that stupid woman.
Now, let’s get to the on-line auction material you’ve been waiting for. There will be more later as for today my goal was to get the fundamentals. It is a new and well-done web site but is not helpful at all for those wishing to view real estate. Here are the major discoveries of the day:
• The entire site is focused on the legal documents of foreclosure. It does not list either the property address or even the type of dwelling. It is not the least helpful to anyone who does not know how to do property searches. The auction is not in any way a real estate sales site.
• Average number of properties listed for two months into the future is only 57 per sale and there are two sales per week, Monday and Thursday. After March, as the system catches on, the average moves up to around 120 per sale.
• Each county in Florida uses a different filing system at their land title offices, so there exists no standard criteria for searching out a given property. Instead, the properties must be painstakingly found one by one. Mind you, I did around eight examples and it gets easier to spot which ones are condos and townhouses (those things only stupid people buy) before wasting too much time.
• Foreign-owned banks and off-shore mortgage companies are clearly much more aggressive in pursuing deadbeat borrowers (via the foreclosure procedure) than those companies with American-sounding business names.
Now let us get into the parts that I picked up on suspicious activity , but do not yet necessarily have any theories as to why it is so. Let’s see if my reputation for spotting unusual patterns pays off any.
• Of the 58 properties on last week’s sale, only 17 of them actually sold. The others have mysterious labels in place of the listing, such as “this case has been removed”.
• Most of the properties have fewer than five bids, and the maximum number of bids was a single outrider with ten.
• There is a systemized team of around six individuals working the system, buying almost every property under one company name or another. The top two bidders are Celeste and Alvin.
Now I am about to write something that will test your IQ. The minute you think you are smarter than me, raise your right hand. Here goes. In all of the 17 bids, the second highest bid was exactly $100 below the winning bid. Ah, have our Einsteins got it figured already? I mean, well of course that is the case, the highest bid wins over the second highest. How could I be dumb enough to overlook the obvious?
Notice I did not say the winning bid was $100 more, I said the second highest bid was $100 less. For some reason, Celeste is putting in the winning bid, and at a later point in time (usually within two hours), Alvin is putting in a bid that is $100 lower. The question is why would Alvin do that every time when he must already know it is not going to be the winning bid? Darn, this is going to require thinking. You can take your hand down now.
Each property has to be painstakingly researched, a trade in itself. So I don’t have to worry about any competition in this town, know what I’m saying? The total number of bidders seems to be around twelve. A place with three bedrooms, three and a half baths, two and a half car garage and pool went for $84,100. What I find more useful is watching these property values plunge since 2005. That same property had been assessed at $664,722.19. Time to hang the appraiser.
There are also certain licensing and registration matters involved, so it is not a free-for-all. And you must have financing in place, as the cash is due at the court house by noon the day following a winning bid. They take cashier’s checks. I will naturally know much more in a week from now. I have at no point stated I will not honor any existing contracts, but I told everyone who stuck with me two years ago that we might have a luxury house by around this time. Seems they were talking when they should have been listening. I repeat, by February 2011, mansions will be selling around here for peanuts.
