Vegas Foreclosure Express Tour

I recently took a bus tour of Las Vegas foreclosures. I saw the advertisement for The Zucker Team in our local Review Journal and had to check them out. Their web site was predominately displayed in their ad so I paid a visit www.vegasforeclosureexpress.com . I signed up for the tour and was pleased to find it everything that was promised in the ad and on the web site.

The real estate couple known as The Zucker Team and their associates were very pleasant and extremely knowledgeable about not only the Las Vegas real estate market but also about a fast growing market within the market known as the bank owned or foreclosed real estate market.

There was a CNNMoney.com article about Las Vegas tops foreclosure list. A major point in that article was that Most middle class still can't buy a house . I grew up in a house that we supposedly owned. However, in all of my years I can't remember my parents not making a house payment. So who really owned the house?

I moved here to Las Vegas before the rise in housing market values. I was here before the rest of California figured it out that they could sell the homes they lived in in Cali and with their equity nearly pay cash for a home in Las Vegas in the mid 90's.

So what do we teach out kids about home purchases and ownership. Well for starters it is not necessarily a sign of success just to be living in a home. We have to teach them to take into account how long do they think thy might live in an area. young people are more mobile and prone to jump up and follow a career than ever before.

I was told to buy more home than I could afford and I would grow into the payments, RIGHT! My parents in the late 50s early 70s may have been the last to see it work that way. That is a big part of the recent foreclosure rate not only in Las Vegas but nationwide. Vegas just had the convenient influx of California equity money burning holes in peoples' pockets.

There were some insane profits made by the early speculators. But like most things the Johnny Come Lates were left holding the bag.

As we also know credit was available to anyone who could fog a mirror. That is not the way I was brought up and as I watched this all take place in the mid 2000s something deep inside my gut told me this was a train wreck about to happen. So a good rule of thumb for young people would be, you buy a house when you've saved enough down payment. Ten to twenty percent would be nice. However, with today's government backed loans I think three percent is certainly doable. When people have a stake in something they tend to take more responsibility.

I saw a lot of houses on that tour and thought about the lessons the kids were learning from the parents who moved them in an out of those houses. I can't imagine how the parents justified or explained to the kids having to move out and change schools. Will they be honest and teach their kids what went wrong. Or will they blame it on the government or economy or maybe even on the rich and the banks. I can't imagine.

I found a TV newscast about The Zucker Team and their Las Vegas Real Estate Foreclosure Express and you can view it here: