Five Tips for Buying a Foreclosure…

Five Tips for Buying a Foreclosure Property

Below Market Value

Thanks To Jim Saccacio, RealtyTrac Chief Executive Officer for the permission to reuse this valuable real estate article.

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If you feel like the escalating costs of real estate have priced you out of the market, think again. It may be time to investigate the vast opportunities available in the foreclosures market.

For people willing to do a bit of homework, the foreclosure market offers some of the best opportunities available in real estate today. Experts point toward significant growth in available foreclosure properties, so there’s never been a better time to line up your resources and educate yourself about this previously hidden market. It’s not unusual to save from 10 to 30 percent of the market value on a foreclosure property, and certain properties offer savings of 50 percent or more! There really are bargains out there. You just have to know where to look.

Web-based services such as RealtyTrac give consumers access to foreclosure and pre-foreclosure information that was previously available
only to professional real estate brokers and investors. Today, homebuyers can use these services to identify and research potential home
purchases, as well as to find the tools and professional resources they need to help them close the deal. RealtyTrac, which provides all
the foreclosure data for both MSN House and Home and Yahoo! Real Estate, has already compiled a list of over 550,000 foreclosure
properties across the country.

The keys to a successful foreclosure property purchase are diligence and patience, along with taking an educated approach to investing in this market. RealtyTrac CEO Jim Saccacio offers five tips to help you close a deal on a foreclosure property:

1. Learn about the different types of properties and the foreclosure process.

Not all foreclosures are the same! You need to educate yourself on the difference between the three basic types of properties, including notice-of-default (NOD), notice of trustee sale (NTS), and real-estate-owned REO, as well as the positive and negative aspects of buying at each stage of the foreclosure cycle.

As a rule of thumb, the best savings can be made at the pre-foreclosure stage, where home owners can avoid a foreclosure and lenders can save the time and cost involved in going through the process. Another critical point in the process is immediately prior to the auction date, when all parties might be most open to a last-minute solution.

2. Secure financing early

It’s important for a buyer to be pre-qualified before engaging in discussions with a seller. This ensures that the buyer is in a financial position to purchase the property, and is in the strongest possible position to negotiate.

3. Engage a real estate agent as a “buyer’s representative”

There’s a distinct difference between a buyer’s and a seller’s representative. Buyer’s representatives have the home buyer’s interests at heart, and are charged with finding the right property and negotiating the best price for their clients. Picking the right real estate agent will make your life much easier. Ideally, select an agent who specializes in the foreclosures market and has specific experience in REO properties.

4. Do your homework

Purchasing foreclosure properties is somewhat more risky than buying traditional real estate properties. But, with that risk comes reward in the form of much higher potential savings. With the right examination and due diligence, buyers can significantly reduce the risks. As with any purchase, timing is everything! But, it makes sense to give any property under consideration a thorough examination, including determining its condition and value, finding out the amount in default and the remaining loan balance, and running a legal investing report to make sure the property is free of any financial liabilities. Of course, it never hurts to foster a positive relationship with the seller!

5. Make a realistic offer

If you want to be taken seriously as a buyer, you must be realistic when preparing an offer. Lenders aren’t likely to give properties away, particularly in a real estate market where prices continue to rise. Additionally, homeowners in financial distress may be difficult to deal with, particularly early in the foreclosure process. An educated buyer—one who knows how much is owed on the property and what its market value is—can usually come up with a realistic offer; one that offers significant savings, while meeting the requirements of the lender.

Largest known prime number found

By Julie Rehmeyer

Web edition : Sunday, September 28th, 2008

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a cooperative computing project, helps find a prime that has nearly 13 million digits.

LARGEST KNOWN PRIME NUMBER.

Printing out all 13 million digits in 12-point type would create a number 30 miles long. But here are a few of the digits, from the beginning and the end of the full number. Full story.Avik Nandy/Science News

 

Editor’s note: This story was originally posted on Science News online as a Math Trek column September 20.

Here’s a number to savor: 2^43,112,609-1.

Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits.

And its form is tidy and lovely: 2ⁿ-1.

But its true beauty is far grander: It is a prime number. Indeed, it is the largest prime number ever found.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a computing project that uses volunteers’ computers to hunt for primes, found the prime and just confirmed the discovery. It can now claim a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being the first to find a prime number that has more than 10 million digits.

Prime numbers make up the “periodic table” of numbers, the building blocks that combine to form all numbers. A prime number is a whole number divisible only by 1 and itself. Euclid in 300 B.C. proved that there are infinitely many of them (click for his beautifully simple proof). Still, that doesn’t make them easy to find. At the beginning of the number line, the primes seem to be everywhere — 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13… — but in the number line’s more distant reaches, prime numbers become elusive.

Because 2^43,112,609-1 has the form 2ⁿ-1, it’s called a “Mersenne prime,” after a French monk born in the 16^th century who made an (incorrect) conjecture about them. Mersenne primes are of particular interest partly because they can be expressed in such a compact form. (It sure is easier to write 2^43,112,609-1 than to type out all 13 million digits!) More significantly, though, some clever methods have been developed to identify them.

The most obvious way to go about identifying any prime number is to try factoring it. First, try dividing by 3, then 5, then 7, etc., and if none of them work, you’ve got a prime. But the last time a new prime was identified this way was in 1588, because as the numbers get bigger, the division takes longer and longer. So mathematicians have developed clever tests for primeness that are simpler to compute. The best one of all, called the Lucas-Lehmer test, only works for Mersenne primes. Remarkably, the method requires no division at all, making it extremely quick.

Only 46 Mersenne primes have ever been found, and GIMPS has found 12 of them. The project recruits volunteers to donate their computers’ CPU cycles when they would otherwise be idle. Each computer works on a single number, first trying to find small factors. If that fails, it applies the Lucas-Lehmer test. A computer working full-time can test a single 10-million-digit number in eight days.

The processing power of all the individual computers linked together is equivalent to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. No supercomputer, though, would devote all its processing time to computing prime numbers.

The finding is unlikely to have significance for number theory, although number theory’s great unanswered question, perhaps, is to find how the prime numbers are distributed. Still, “you never know where discoveries may lead you,” says George Woltman, founder of GIMPS. “But really, it’s like climbing Mt. Everest. You do it because it’s there. It’s a lot safer, though. You can do it from the air-conditioned comfort of your home.”

Or, if you prefer, the air-conditioned comfort of your office. The computer that found the prime was administered by Edson Smith at the University of California, Los Angeles mathematics department. Smith downloaded the GIMPS software, and when the computers in the math department weren’t busy with other work, they searched for primes and communicated their results back to GIMPS.

This prime is the eighth found at UCLA, although the first with GIMPS. Half the prize money will go to the UCLA math department, a quarter will go to charity (probably a math department with an open faculty position for number theory, Woltman says) and most of the remainder will go to those who found previous Mersenne primes using GIMPS.

Remarkably, GIMPS found another Mersenne prime two weeks after this one – after a two-year dry spell with no new primes. This prime had fewer digits, just 11 million.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation became interested in prime hunting because it makes an excellent challenge problem for cooperative, distributed computing. “The award is an incentive to stretch the computational ability of the Internet,” says Landon Noll of Cisco Systems Inc., one of the judges for the Electronic Frontier Foundation prize and a discoverer of a former biggest known prime. More prizes remain to be claimed: a $150,000 award for a prime with 100 million digits, and a $250,000 award for one with a billion digits.

GIMPS has used well-established methods, while continuing to refine its implementations for greatest efficiency. Finding the numbers for the larger awards, though, will require major innovations, Noll says: “People are going to have to go back to the drawing board.” He points out that testing a single 100-million–digit number for primeness would take a single desktop computer more than four years, and testing a billion-digit number would take it more than 500 years. So at a minimum, he says, algorithms will have to be developed that allow multiple computers to test a single prime.

Current cryptographic systems rely on the challenge of factoring large primes. This task is distinct from verifying primeness, but the root difficulty is the same: limited computing power. Through this prize, “we maintain a pulse on what people might be able to do in breaking cryptosystems,” Noll says.

Demon Barber?

Join The Imperial Theatre

Imperial Theater

… as Westobou Festival activities kick off this week including a Retrospective film event, Opera, Ballet, Jazz, and Bluegrass!

Imperial Theatre

745 Broad Street
Augusta, Georgia 30901
706-722-8341
www.imperialtheatre.com

Sweeney Todd,
the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Westobou Festival

Augusta Opera presents the Augusta premiere of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. You’ve seen the movie, now watch the blood flow LIVE on the Imperial stage. “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” sings the chorus as it ebbs and wanes like an amoeba in this dark tale of revenge and death. A Tony award-winning musical with a book by Hugh Wheeler and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it is based on the 19th-century legend of Sweeney Todd, and specifically upon the 1973 play by Christopher Bond. Sweeney Todd, fact or fiction? See it and be your own judge and jury. For mature audiences only. A Westobou Festival event.

Friday, September 19th, 8PM
Saturday, September 20th, 8 PM
Imperial Theatre
745 Broad Street
Augusta, Georgia 30901
For tickets call The Augusta Opera (706) 826-4710 or www.AugustaOpera.com

 

Imperial Theatre | 745 Broad Street | Augusta | GA | 30901

Barbers, Doctors, and Leeches

 

Musings of a Distractible Mind
Source: Distractible.org

You expect your doctor to listen.  You expect a sharp mind, a good thought process, a smile, and a solution to your problem. I walk into those…

Doctors love to relax in the barber’s chair and I can see why.
That’s the way it should be.

Barbers were aka barber-surgeons during the 1700s.Their “patients” were often treated with leeches…a practice still used today…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

Pat…”have you seen that jar of leeches?“

Y’all come see us!

Billy