Charlotte Real Estate, Foreclosures, Short Sales

As home foreclosures continue unabated at the rate of more than 9,000 per day with forecasts indicating financial institutions will hold more than 4 million properties by December, entrepreneurs are seeing opportunity while others are losing their shirts.  Christopher Wiley and co-founder Paul Roper last month launched ReoLynx.com, a site vying to be a "quassi-eBay" for institutional bulk buys of foreclosed homes. Investors can pick through the more than 1,000 homes listed on the site, build a portfolio and make a bid.  Portfolio Matrix Partners announces the launch of ReoLynx, a collaboration of best of breed service providers, to support the orderly redistribution of distressed real estate assets via an exchange environment.

A Sea of Opportunity

Additional companies such as VerifiedREOs.com, another online marketplace based in Los Angeles, recently began running 30-second television spots on cable-news shows in the New York market. BulkREO.com, of Bailey, Colo., began operations last year. Those sites, unlike ReoLynx, sell portfolios assembled by the sellers, rather than the buyers.

Not an Easy Fix

So far sales have been less than expected.  The Web clearinghouses does not reveal much about their transactions so their performance is difficult to gauge.  ReoLynx is holding weekly auctions, but hasn't sold any homes so far. Wiley said the first ''cycle,'' which closed Oct. 15, attracted more than 3,000 bids. Last week, for the first time, a handful of bids were accepted on homes with prices ranging between $20,000 and $190,000, the partners said. It could be several weeks before any transactions close.Ken Starks, a principal of Conexis Capital Partners, an investment firm in Gilbert, Ariz., said he has tried to buy homes in bulk, but many of the deals have fallen through. ''We get to the end of a bid and the seller says, 'Gosh, we didn't get the bid we wanted so we're not going to sell,''' he said.   Vicki Vidal, associate vice president of government affairs for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, said banks holding lots of foreclosed properties get calls from investors interested in bulk purchases, but rarely at a price that makes sense. ''Nothing is moving in some places right now,''

Bank Will Need to Adjust

Part of the problem is that banks don't have the expertise or resources to offload homes they recently have repossessed. ''The banks really haven't been staffed up or organized to deal with the large amounts of volume they're seeing,'' said Jim Shelton, vice chairman of Carter & Associates, an Atlanta real-estate investment and development company that is looking at bulk purchases in the Atlanta area.