Hard money lending for the VP?

[Kriegsspiel]

MG, don't you live in California? From what I gather, California is a tax deed state, are you going out of state to get your tax liens?

Yep, but I didn't know tax deeds were an alternative -- and perhaps superior -- way to invest.  Need to look into that.

This isn't a bad retirement job to generate income if one really want to get into it (its complex, but you just need intelligence).  The Wall Street funds have size concerns so they're not gonna waste time bidding for smaller liens.  They're fine using millions to bid 16% down to .25% because they get a guaranteed return + their management fees.  What a racket!

I guess it would depend on the specific state and situation. From what I can tell, tax deeds are a more expensive way to get control of property(you are bidding based on what the house appraisal is), whereas with tax liens you are only paying off their taxes, the property value doesn't come into play. So you could eventually come into a property for a few thousand dollars (?) instead of $15,000 or whatever the deed would cost. And if the owner does pay you for their lien, you'll be making money that way too. I am not sure if deadbeats are required to pay interest on the tax deed "down payment"/title research/etc, are they?

[MachineGhost]

In the forum's down time, I had a chance to check out the real estate P2P ecosystem.  There's a lot of players now.

The "LendingClub" of them all is FundRise.com.  They originally offered P2P real estate investments, but have since pivoted their business model into offering non-public eREIT's.  This is a smart move as the investment minimums will be lower and allow for broader diversification.  Being accredited (whether by old-school self-affirmation or JOBS Act explicit verification) isn't required.  Come May 16, there will be a flood of non-accredited Boobus Americanus all looking for startup and alternative investments.  Their new equity fund closed the very first day to process the first batch of investments within the 10 minutes or so after I discovered it by happenstance.  How annoying!

The rest of the ecosystem is full of startup wannabes looking to hit it big, but they have high minimums, mostly indirect investments, accreditation requirements and lots of "man in the middle" fees.  A notable exception may be RealCrowd.com which acts just as a conduit for direct real estate investments and charges no fees to the investor.

Give the troubles Prosper.com has had lately, I'd recommend sticking to Fundrise.com.  It's bad enough to take on the risk of real estate without having to also worry about counter-party risk with a middleman servicer.

Do note that the very best of the best real estate deals are highly funded up by established, private, accredited investor networks before they show up on these P2P sites.  That's another arrow for FundRise's sling.  May 16 is going to change the signal to noise ratio and I doubt it will be for the better, so you want to keep an eye out in terms of maintaining "elite access".