Casey Serin: Housing Crunch Poster Child? Or Just Damned Unlucky?
Posted: August 7th, 2008 | Author: Joe | Filed under: Economy, Investing, Real Estate | Tags: Economy, Mortgage Mess, news | 1 Comment »I stumbled on this video a few days back, and it made me wonder: how representative of the housing crunch is this guy?
For those of you who haven’t heard of Casey Serin, he was a self made real estate speculator. A guy who watched a video, read a couple of books and became a real estate flipper – at precisely the wrong time.
I wonder if the majority of those hit by the crunch were speculators or flippers… I have heard that bandied about a bit, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find any hard data on just who is in foreclosure. I feel pretty confident however that there are a fair number of people like Casey in the mix.
Think about it – this guy is potentially responsible for 8 foreclosures alone! Maybe the spike in foreclosures isn’t really a bunch of families struggling to make ends meet, but inexperienced speculators caught in the collapse of the real estate bubble.
The video outlines a bunch of mistakes he made:
- He paid $15k for “seminars” on flipping.
- Bought at the top of the market (an over priced one too!)
- He lied to lenders.
It’s mostly the last one that irks me most. Guys like this not only run up the prices of homes, but they also game the system making it harder for honest home buyers to afford a home they might need. And they factor in that this guy will probably get bailed out by congress if he doesn’t go to jail first. It really burns my bacon.
I think he’s just a kid who got into something he didn’t understand to a point where he was way over his head before he realized what was happening. But there needs to be some personal responsibility somewhere as well.
Casey Serin had his own blog for a time at iamfacingforeclosure.com, but he seems to have let it go so he can “move on” from the experience.
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[...] door”? It’s practically sounding the dinner bell! This is exactly the sort of loan that Casey Serin took advantage of when building his flipping fortune, only he ended up getting flipped and walking away from his [...]