The Norris Group

October 18, 2011 Bruce Norris, president of Norris Group, an investment company in Riverside that buys foreclosed homes, said the repossessions are "unfortunately, unrealistically small" when compared with what banks need to do to keep up with the number of homeowners falling behind on their mortgages. "It is just going to take a very long time to hit a firm bottom and to go up for real," Norris said. "You have so many people who are not making their payments."

October 18, 2011 Bruce Norris, President of The Norris Group, a real estate investment company, said the banks’ procrastination accounts for delinquent homeowners staying in their houses for up to two years without making any mortgage payments and without being evicted. It is not unusual that at the end of their free say that the same people demand “cash for keys” to leave without trashing the place, he added with chagrin. Norris had a couple suggestions for enlarging the pool of people qualified to buy the massive number of houses with failed mortgages. One way would be to allow people to buy homes with no money down as long as they have income enough to afford the mortgage. There are plenty of would be buyers able to afford a home at today’s low prices and interest rates who don’t have enough saved for a down payment, Norris said. If any of them later default, he suggested that another buyer should be allowed to take title by making good on the missed payments.

October 1, 2011 Us: Is it over yet in O.C. and/or SoCal? Bruce: No, unfortunately it isn’t over. There are many property owners delinquent by over 18 months who have yet to be foreclosed on. The amount of inventory in the MLS is misleading. It looks like a much healthier market than it is. Someday soon, these delinquent properties will hit the market either as a short sale or an REO. In Riverside, about 65% of properties sold are either short sales or REOs. Former owners with a foreclosure or short sale on their record don’t re-enter the market as a buyer because they can get financing. For every 1,000 sales, Riverside needs to find 650 new buyers to replace those that are now non-buyers. For Orange County, it’s closer to 30%, or 300 new buyers. Both areas are seeing all-time record numbers when comparing percentage of distressed sales to normal sales. That ratio prevents price support partially because each sale removes a formerly capable buyer from the market.

September 8, 2011 Bruce Norris, a partner with Southern California property firm Norris Group, would like to see repossessed homes end up in the hands of investors. If Fannie and Freddie provided loans to these investors, he suggests, the lending agreements could specify that properties be maintained as rentals.

August 30, 2011 He said he chose to invest through The Norris Group, a real estate investment firm in Riverside, because he was impressed by its track record and how it screens properties and borrowers. He said he started small, with an investment of under $60,000. Now he said he has $400,000 invested in four rental houses, each with eight-year paybacks.

May 18, 2011

March 24, 2011

January 4, 2011 Government intervention is the driver of the real estate market now. That's bad because the government is preventing a "natural" market from solving the problems for itself. By intervening, the government creates false inventory levels and price support that experienced people are very suspicious of. The big players won't take risks with that type of playing field.

January 1, 2011 "We are in an artificial recovery," Norris said. "It's government controlled and manipulated. We have extremely favorable interest rates that we really should not have, based on our debt. We have supported real estate with tax rebates, and we have prevented inventory from showing up by allowing people to be two and three years behind on their mortgages."

December 2010

“We tell people to get out of deals every month,” says Bruce Norris, CEO of the California-based Norris Group, which brokers hard-money investment loans as well as valuable information to investors.

September 1, 2010 On a more pessimistic note, Norris threw cold water on real estate industry expectation that there is pent up demand from home buyers just waiting for the best time to jump into the market. Not only did the home buying fervor of a few years back steal home sales from the future, he said, but the large number of people who now owe more money on their homes than they could sell them for are in no position to move anywhere and become new buyers.

August 20, 2010 Competition at the auctions is brutal, said Bruce Norris of Norris Group, a real estate investment firm in Riverside.

August 19, 2010

August 1, 2010 But Norris warns that the county is little more than halfway through its problem with “Alt-A” adjustable mortgages, which targeted a more upscale clientele than the subprimes. Norris estimates that 44 percent of those loans will adjust in 2010 and beyond, totaling 17,500 loans, which could give rise to a new round of foreclosures if the borrowers have the same problems making payments as their subprime counterparts did.

July 16, 2010

May 7, 2010 "If we're going to try to resolve some of our problems and pay for stuff that's gone on in the past, I think you're going to have to say 'We're going to have to pay some higher taxes.'" Norris also predicts higher unemployment, aging consumers buying less and saving more which he says will mean more burden on the government due to fewer tax revenues and greater expense for government.

March 21, 2010 Bruce Norris, a longtime Riverside real estate investor and consultant who warned other investors early on that the real estate market was about to tank, said the deluge of houses hitting the foreclosure auctions and the numbers of buyers chasing them are far beyond what he had expected. He recalled that a year ago it was common for just a handful of investors to turn out to hear the trustee's auctioneer reel off the addresses of houses for sale and sometimes the auctioneer would speak to an empty courtyard, he said.

March 9, 2010 "What's going to go on now for the next 24 months is very expensive homes are going to start being foreclosed on," said Bruce Norris of The Norris Group, who advises investors looking to buy property in Riverside. "We've already seen 7 and 8,000 square-foot houses get foreclosed on and sell for less than a hundred bucks a foot, so the bad news for this guy is he probably owns a $1.5 million property."

Norris sald lenders and the federal government have been slowing the foreclosure process to prevent a further deterioration of housing prices. As a result, he noted, delinquent borrowers are being allowed to stay in their homes for months, sometimes years, longer than normal without making mortgage payments. "People are being allowed to be delinquent because lenders aren't sure what they would do with these properties," Norris said.