HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
LOS ANGELES SPOTLIGHT
Small lot subdivision: Developer Jonathon Dillworth with c&d partners purchased two single-story single family homes at the corner of N. Man- sfield Avenue and Fountain Avenue in Los Angeles, each with two bedrooms and one bathroom (photo on left), and is subdividing them into four two-story single family homes, each with three bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms (rendering on right). More details on Page 20.
tracking NODs on RealtyTrac since 2005 and at the height of the crisis saw as many as 100 commercial loans fall into default a week in Los Angeles. “We get about 10 a week now (in Los Angeles). We’re starting to see more come out of Orange County, Riverside and San Bernardino.” Newton said his company recently facilitated the sale of an $11 million commercial non-performing note that he found out about on Feb. 1 and was closed on within three weeks. “They gave me five on one day,” he said, referring to a trustee company that contacted him directly. “One was $11 million. We closed it already. We have three or four more that we are still trying to work. … We find all kinds of stuff. Now the lenders will call us: ‘I’ve got a note; see if you can get rid of it for me.’”
A total of 1,069 NODs were filed in Los Angeles County in February, up 32 percent from the previous month and up 7 percent from a year ago, according to ATTOM Data Solutions. It was only the second month with a year-over-year increase in NODs in the last 12 months, but was still less than one-tenth of the 15,165 NODs filed in Los Angeles County in March 2009 at the height of the foreclosure crisis. Unlike Gomez, the Norwalk investor, fellow Los Angeles real estate investor Bruce Bartlett is still in acquisition mode. Bartlett, managing partner at Sequoia Real Estate Partners headquartered in the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles, gravitated toward the higher end of the market when he began to face stiffer competition in the lower end in 2012.
“We were getting stuff off the courthouse steps then, but once all the big private equity funds moved in, we moved up market because that’s where the margins were,” said Bartlett, a former literary agent in the movie business until 2007, when he saw “the writing on the wall that that part of the business was dying” and went back to school for his MBA before launching a full-time real estate investing career in partnership with one of his UCLA professors. “Let’s go out and buy REOs,” Bartlett said of the duo’s strategy in 2007. “That was before anyone was doing it.” Silicon Beach a “Structural” Change But now Bartlett has shifted his investing strategy to the higher end of the market, buying homes in the $800,000 to $2 million price range. He argued that sales
ATTOM Data Solutions • P15
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter