The skills needed to be a successful Baltimore foreclosure investor are varied and need to be honed over time. The skills necessary depend on what level you want to be involved in the business. However, the more skills you are competent in, the more profitable your real estate business will be.

I have skills in many areas of the real estate business construction and destruction, evaluation and negotiation, sales and marketing, mortgage and title experience, and persistence and persuasion. It takes many deals but not many years to accumulate these skills and the best way to get started is to go do deals. You may have challenges with your deals but do not give up because the rewards are wonderful.

One of the areas you are going to need to be successful in the foreclosure business is evaluating deals looking at numbers, understanding numbers, crunching numbers and making sure a deal works out on paper. Now, is this important? Yes, it’s important. Do you have to be a mathematical wizard to understand this and be successful? No, there are definitely books and software on basic real estate finance that you can use.

Your experience will be your best teacher and evaluator of potential deals. You can also use a real estate calculator. There are many easy ones to use, and there are difficult ones. But real estate calculators are necessary to compute things such as amortization tables, loan to value and principal and interest payments. Get one and learn to use it. You will need to be able to estimate the costs of products, repairs, taxes, and insurance. But once again, experience is the great teacher.

One of the major skills you are going to need in the foreclosure business is persistence. You’ll need it in all aspects of the real estate business, but more so in the foreclosure business. There may be times you need to go back to a house you have targeted three to six times before you actually get to talk to the homeowner. Persistence is one of the major keys to success in this business.

Another skill that you need for successful foreclosure investing is the ability to read people, the ability to understand what they are going through, to have empathy and to understand their situation. I think one of the reasons my company is as successful as it is is because I can put myself in the place of the homeowner and have a tremendous amount of empathy. Homeowners feel and appreciate that because what they want is someone to have confidence in. If you can transfer that feeling of confidence and knowledge to the homeowner you will enjoy great success.

An additional skill you’ll need in the foreclosure business is to have skin thick as a rhino. You’ll have doors slammed in your face, you’ll have people yell at you, people may even throw things at you. Don’t take it personally. Turn around, walk away and move on to the next one. Don’t let it bother you. This business is a numbers game. These people you have approached will probably end up being tossed out of their houses, and you will continue in the business if you can adapt what I call the “rhino skin”.

The foreclosure business also requires understanding the legal process in regards to foreclosures at a basic level. Know the laws and procedures for the state in which the foreclosure takes place. You need to understand the particular laws and nuances of your state. It’s imperative that the real estate investor understands from start to finish the foreclosure process, the bankruptcy process, and the redemption process if the state has one. Bankruptcy can be a very daunting process if you don’t understand the differences between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcies.

It takes a practiced, hardened, persistent, creative, intuitive, persuasive investor to be successful in the foreclosure market. Many investors in the real estate market have some of these traits. Few have them all. The person who has all of these traits is the person who is ideal for the foreclosure market.

As you begin to buy real estate you will become exposed to evaluating property and to appraisals. A critical component to being successful in the business is understanding what you are doing in regards to putting it all together, getting ready to buy, making sure you are doing a deal that makes sense financially and making a profit. The buying and selling of distressed real estate basically, the business of foreclosures–is a tricky and risky business, especially if you are not prepared. The spoils go to the ones that are prepared.

Paul Wells has been investing in foreclosures full-time for more than 5 years. For more foreclosure investing secrets like the one in this article, subscribe to Paul’s Free Foreclosure Investing course here: http://www.FreeForeclosureInvesting.com

Even though it may not be a term you’re proverbial with, the term FICO can be a shaping factor as to whether or not you meet the criteria for a credit or loan. But what is FICO, and how does it have an effect on you when it comes to your credit attraction?

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The short form FICO in fact stands for Fair Isaac Company, which was the company that initially produced a mathematical number for the credit reporting company Experian. FICO was planned as a tool that could be used by creditors to calculate the potential risks involved in letting somebody have the money. In reality, there are other similar models that have been developed by other credit bureaus, but all of their results are referred to by the industry as FICO scores.

FICO scores are calculated by probing the answers to number questions, based on the information in your credit and on your income to debt ratio. The responses to each question hold a certain number of points, and when all the answers are added up, that number stand for your FICO score.

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Your FICO score will depend upon such things as how long you’ve lived at your current address, what your job is, your income-to-debt ratio, how often you’ve been late on payments, how much debt you currently have, the amount of credit you’re using already, and the length of time you’ve had your credit established.

The most heavily weighted factors in determining your FICO score will be the current balances on your credit cards, having either too few or too many revolving accounts, the number of accounts you have that carry balances, how many accounts you’ve opened over the past twelve months, the length of time you’ve had your accounts, your past due accounts, and the number of credit inquiries that have been made in your behalf.

A good FICO score would be at least 650. If your score is 620 or less, you’ll be considered a risky candidate for a loan or credit card by potential creditors. A score between 620 and 650 will put you into a “possible” category, which means that you may need to provide more information to the lender before you’ll be approved for credit. A FICO score of more than 650 will put you into the “go-ahead” category, since it will show potential lenders that you’ve been a good credit risk in the past.

The higher your FICO number, the better, of course, since you will begin to get better interest rates on loans the closer your FICO number gets to 850.

It may not be a well-known number, but your FICO score can be important to your financial well-being.

The cast of characters. Everyone knows what a bank is. Most of us understand what a lender is ? an institution from whom money is borrowed. Adding the word ?commercial? to describe a lender simply means that the financial entity deals with businesses as opposed to individuals. Black?s Law Dictionary defines ?commercial loans? as: ?loans made to businesses as distinguished from personal-consumer credit loans.? Although a lender could make both commercial and consumer loans, this blog is dedicated primarily to commercial matters.

The field of law. To me, commercial Bank REO Foreclosure law refers to the rules and procedures applicable when a business defaults on a loan secured by some kind of collateral. So, if you work for an institution that loaned money to a business, and if the borrower defaulted under the terms of the loan agreement, then commercial Bank REO Foreclosure law provides the judicial framework for the protection of your rights. Typically, those rights involve the ability to collect money owed by the borrower through the sale of the loan collateral.

Collateral. Black?s states that collateral is property pledged as security for the satisfaction of a debt. If a business defaults on a loan, the lender can initiate a Bank REO Foreclosure action to compel the sale of the loan collateral and therefore collect the amounts owed by the borrower through proceeds from the sale. There are all kinds of business-related collateral. Perhaps the most recognizable is real estate ? the land a business owns. Some of the most interesting cases, however, deal with personal property collateral, which can be any property imaginable that is owned by a business ? a fleet of cars, office furniture or intangibles such as accounts receivable.

Lien. A lien is a description of an encumbrance on property: ?a claim . . . on property for payment of some debt.? Black?s. In the context of my blog, a lien arises by written contract between a lender and a borrower ? either a real estate mortgage agreement or a personal property security agreement. The lien granted by a borrower to a lender gives a lender the right to foreclose upon the subject property (collateral) for payment of the debt in the event of a default.

Commercial Bank REO Foreclosure. Turning again to Black?s, a Bank REO Foreclosure is defined, in part, as the ?enforcement of a lien . . . or mortgage . . ..? Paraphrasing Black?s, Bank REO Foreclosure is the legal process by which real or personal property subject to a lien is sold in satisfaction of a debt. To foreclose means to terminate a borrower?s rights in the subject property. A Bank REO Foreclosure that is commercial merely refers to the termination of a business borrower?s rights in its property.

A form of collection. Commercial Bank REO Foreclosure law is a special kind of collection law. It?s a body of rules governing how banks and financial institutions recover money by asserting rights in, and selling, collateral that a business granted to secure the loan. It?s the set of legal principles applicable to a lender needing to collect money owed by a business, which failed to make its loan payments or otherwise defaulted under the terms of the loan documents. If any of these matters are relevant to what you do for a living, I welcome your visits to my blog and hope that you will e-mail me with your questions or comments.