I Am Facing Foreclosure.com – A Naive Investor’s Foreclosure Assistance Site Does Teach One Lesson

I Am Facing Foreclosure.com .  An interesting name.   I have seen this website for a while. It comes up when you search foreclosure in Google. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it. Some kid named Casey Serin tried to make millions in real estate investments. He obviously had no clue about what he was doing. So he fails, loses properties to foreclosure, and decides to post his entire personal and financial life on a blog, mistakes and all. And then he gives readers a chance to comment. Some of his reader’s posts are amusing. They use screen names like “Train Wreck Watcher”, “Soup Nazi” (a Seinfeld reference), and “Lost Cause.” They all think he is just stupid. Or really naive. Some are outright insulting but I honestly think he deserves it for his lame get rich quick strategy. There is little sympathy out there for poor Casey. I think he has recently been on the Suze Orman show and the other night I saw him on some news show. Might have been Dateline on NBC but honestly I wasn’t paying attention to that. I was too busy being bothered by this guy. Here’s why.    

     Apparently, his story is that he bought 8 properties in various states. Casey says he used 100% financing to buy them and, in some cases, more than 100% financing, so he could not only have enough money to buy the property, he would have extra money to repair or renovate. His idea was to become rich by flipping the properties at a profit without ever coming out of his own pocket. He is not the first person to have this idea. He just made all bad decisions about which properties to buy and he over-leveraged himself with no reserve funds. So, he has basically had a chain of failures. A domino effect, where he can’t recover. In the midst of this, he takes a trip to Hawaii.    

       So, what does he do? Facing imminent financial destruction, he sets up a website. He goes on tv. He actually admits on tv that he lied on his mortgage loan applications to borrow the money. I couldn’t believe it. So naive. Not only does he lie to get a loan – possibly a criminal act – he admits it on national tv! He says that he did “no-doc stated” loans, where the borrower basically states his income and the lender doesn’t verify it. There are lenders that will do this so long as the appraised property value can sustain the loan. Apparently, his lenders thought so at the time the loans were made. The reality was that he couldn’t sell his properties for what he wanted. He even said that he bought one property for over $300k and the neighbor later told him it was worth only 165k and, in the end, he had trouble selling the property for $100k less than what he paid for it originally. Seems to me that they ought to be interviewing the appraisers. Something seems wrong here.  

      So, where does this leave Casey? Nowhere. To me, from a bankruptcy and foreclosure perspective, his situation is borderline hopeless, if not altogether hopeless. He probably can’t save any of his properties in Chapter 13 because he probably won’t have enough income to pay back his mortgage arrears and other debts. He may not even qualify if he has no “regular income.” If he tries to file Chapter 7 and discharge the debt, he may face objections to his discharge. If I were his lender’s counsel, I’d recommend that they commence an adversary proceeding to declare his debt nondischargeable on the ground that he obtained it with false financial statements.  All they need to do is offer his tv admission as proof.  If he does nothing, he will probably lose all of the properties. And, refinancing seems out of the question because he maxed out his equity. He could be in a financial mess for a very long time. He did have one success, I have to admit. He made it into Google’s top 10 on search engine results. Small consolation I suppose.  Maybe he has one way out. He can sell his story to a publisher and they can make the movie.  People do stop and rubberneck to stare at a car accident.  We just can’t help ourselves.     

      It is unfortunate that he made his website and that he is getting so much press. The website has no redeeming qualities.   Sometimes, he actually appears to be giving out legal advice (another potential crime).  Who would even want his advice?       There are many decent people in foreclosure because of reasonable justifiable reasons such as a job loss, death in the family, divorce, etc. Casey is where he is because he was greedy and lazy. Perhaps his site can teach us one thing. There is no such thing as “get rich quick.” Lesson learned: if an investment deal looks too good to be true, it’s not.