If you have seen the St. George Foreclosure Tour bus traveling down the streets of your neighborhood, chances are there is a home in your area that is on their tour. Each week, home buyers wanting to get in on some of the great foreclosure deals in southern Utah are registering on stgeorgeforeclosuretours.com and securing themselves a seat on the bus. Bus Tour Entrepreneur Blake Bench says, “On our last several tours the bus has been full, and I don’t see it declining anytime soon.”
Benches’ reasoning is due to a housing phenomenon called "ghost inventory", and according to Bench, “It is something I think the general public is better off not knowing about because it seems like we are all a little overloaded with doom and gloom.” However, ghost inventory can be explained in the following manner. If I am a large bank and did a lot of loans over the past four years, it is almost inevitable that I have a lot of foreclosures on my books. If I put them all up for sale at the same time it will cause a huge oversupply of homes that will require greatly reduced prices to sell them. Rather than doing that, I will bring them to market in small groups, move those groups quickly and as close to the asking price as possible and then move on to the next group. In the meantime, more and more homes are being foreclosed on and piling up behind the ones already waiting to go to market.
All of these empty homes waiting to go to market with no for sale signs in their yard are called ghost inventory. According to Bench, “These ghost inventory homes do not show up on the MLS yet and so almost nobody knows about them except for the neighbors who wonder, ‘That family moved out a year ago, why isn't the home for sale yet?’ A large majority of the realtors don't know about them or where they are. We have seen the first wave of foreclosures but there is a tsunami coming.”
Stgeorgeforeclosuretours.com’s goal is to help move as many foreclosed homes as possible so that they can clean out the regular MLS inventory and ghost inventory and start down the road of a housing recovery so that homes will start to regain their value again.
Bench also warns that not all foreclosures are good deals but in his opinion, 90% of the great deals are foreclosures. The trick is finding them. "We help educate people on how to do that so that they can benefit from someone else's misfortune," says Bench. "It is sad to think that so many people lost their homes, but it is also rewarding to help those people who scraped and saved when everyone else was buying homes with money they didn't have and income they didn't really make." For more information about the tours go to stgeorgeforeclosuretours.com or call 888-282-1178.
