Distressed Property Blog

“This is as good a distressed environment as we’ve seen in a long time,” says John Grayken. He is the managing partner at Lone Star Funds, which is attempting to raise as much as $10 billion for an opportunity fund to purchase residential mortgages, office buildings and hotels. “It’s a race among a number of different lenders to play this,” said Grayken.

It was no April Fools’ joke when on Tuesday Blackstone Group LP announced that they had raised a record-breaking $10.9 billion for their opportunity fund. This is the company’s ninth property fund, bringing their capital dedicated to buying real estate to almost $28 billion.

Opportunity funds like Lone Star’s and Blackstone’s are looking for at least a 20% return on their investments by taking advantage of the fallout from the subprime mortgage debacle. While you may not have $28 billion to invest, the opportunity for profitable distressed property investing is at an all time high.

How do you find those opportunities? You might try one my company’s new sites—Houses.net—where you can find thousands of distressed properties right now. During the month of March, over 100,000 people visited Houses.net, where you can search through over 30,000 sellers who are waiting for an offer…any offer.

Houses.Net stands alone as the only source for buyers searching for homes below market value. This is not a listing or foreclosure subscription service. These are pre-foreclosed, distressed and auctioned properties which have not been available until now. And even though the site is still in its Beta release and there hasn’t been a lot of attention brought to it, we received over one million page views in the month of March. This says to me that a lot of people–buyers and sellers alike–have a sincere or vested interest in distressed properties.