Buying a HUD home in Orlando Florida has gotten just that much trickier

In December 2010, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development a/k/a HUD made major changes to how they sell their HUD homes. Instead of having a bunch of regional or statewide asset manager portals for bidding on their foreclosure houses, HUD centralized everything onto one site www.hudhomestore.com .

This is great for consumers in that it simplifies their searching process, but (and I can only speak for myself) it has been a sheer nightmare for real estate brokers. Not only do big changes create an all new learning curve, but it also seems HUD's asset managers are quite confused as well.

HUD first automated back in the late 1990s by going from paper bid submissions at the old downtown Orlando HUD office to online bidding. But from about 1999 until December 2010, all HUD bids in Florida were done via an asset manager website. Southeast Alliance in Atlanta handled all of Florida for the first part of the 2000s and NHMSI in Coral Gables/Miami handled the HUD bids during the last half of the decade.

But now things are quite different. Instead of one asset manager for all of Florida, now the asset managers are broken up by regions of the state. Agents with our firm actively bid on HUD homes in over 20 counties right now, and the asset manager serving Orange County is different from the one in Polk County or Miami-Dade County. And because there are different asset managers, they all want a little bit different paperwork and even want it filled out differently.

Second of all, they changed all the minimum bid percentages. I have literally spent years, figuring out the minimum acceptable bid depending on the number of price reductions, the county, and the property type. Now those figures are all different.

But the great thing is that our office is very active with bidding on HUD properties. We are already on the forward end of the learning curve for the new system. There are certain tricks and techniques to beat out other bidders and if you wish to drag out the closing for very long periods of time. And our firm is taking major notes on just what these new techniques are.

So if you are interesting in bidding on a HUD home in Central Florida, give our office a call. And if you are a real estate broker and do not have a clue where to begin on submitting a bid, we will partner the deal with you and handle all the paperwork and bidding.

At Sand Dollar Realty Group, we pride ourselves on being Orlando's premiere investor friendly realty office since 1996.