OK, so the first thing you need to do is simply call them to find out their purchase procedures. Yes – it really is that easy! Just tell them you are a real estate investor and you are interested in buying a property at their upcoming auction.

Here is how it worked at a recent auction I phoned about – they simply wanted a cashiers check for $5,000 initially for you to bid, and say if the winning bid was $200,000, then they wanted 5% within 24 hours – meaning I would have to bring in another 5% for a total of $10,000. Then they wanted you to close in 30 days. So you would need to either get a loan or use cash (private hard money lending for instance) within the 30 days to buy.

Sound pretty simple right? Well here is something else Bruce Norris said at the Bill Gatten / Norris conference – can you believe that the lenders are the ones that don’t have their ducks in a row and the closing sometimes goes way over the 30 days as they don’t have all the paperwork ready for you to close! Fancy that – a lender being swamped with paperwork! I’m just joking – we all know their is a mountain of paperwork lenders are facing in today’s foreclosure environment but just wanted to give you a heads up that you may have more time than 30 days to close and what that means, more time to find your retail buyer to flip that house to!

You see, in the last year if you went with a mindset that you will get a great deal at these auctions your chances of that were pretty slim as they didn’t let the price go too low or as low as a SANE real estate investor would pay for a property to allow a profit margin after fix up, marketing costs, realtor commissions paid, holding costs and your cost of financing.

Well, as reported by Bruce Norris at a recent Bill Gatten real estate seminar, the tide has turned as his company finally won an auction for a price that is a deal for a real estate investor. His team had to look at 40 houses to find that one deal but he figures there is about $20,000 profit in that deal.

Stay tuned for more info on the real estate auction house prices.