Jan Brzeski stands in a sun-filled, beautifully refurbished living room high in the Hollywood Hills, looking out at a swimming pool and, miles below, stunning views of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Brzeski is a private money lender running an investment firm in Los Angeles that provides loans to house flippers, investors who buy a home, refurbish it, and sell it on at a profit. Many flippers go to money lenders because they can\u2019t get banks to provide such short-term, quick financing.<\/p>\n
Standing with Brzeski is Scott Ryan, the realtor who bought this four-bedroom, five-bathroom house in December 2012 for $1.5m \u2014 with money lent by Brzeski \u2014 and has transformed it with another $600,000. This week the property will go on the market at $3.295m. \u201cPeople will come in here and fall in love,\u201d Ryan said, with a house flipper\u2019s standard issue optimism. \u201cThis is an emotional sale. If it takes a week to sell, I will be surprised. There are a lot of young, wealthy people here, and a lot of money out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eighteen months ago, Brzeski and his firm, Arixa Capital Advisors, were lending investor money to flippers on very different properties: $250,000 single family homes in southern California\u2019s up-and-coming low to middle class blue-collar neighbourhoods. Most of the deals involved foreclosed homes that were totally refurbished, and then sold quickly.<\/p>\n
No more. Brzeski now focuses on developers working on high-end flips of mansions and townhouses in exclusive neighbourhoods, such as the Hollywood Hills and Bel Air. And he is not alone. There has been a surge in high-end and luxury flipping nationwide. Between 2011 and today, flips of homes valued at $1m or more have risen almost 40 percent across the United States, according to RealtyTrac, the housing data company.<\/p>\n
Between 2011 and 2012, high-end flipping rose 456pc in Phoenix (150 properties from 27); 867pc in Orlando (29 homes from 3); and to 73 properties from 10 in Las Vegas, according to RealtyTrac. To qualify as a flip for the figures, a home has to be bought and sold within six months.<\/p>\n
Brzeski says two main factors combined to send him upmarket in the projects he lends on.<\/p>\n
Newly flush Wall Street investors moved into the mid-market with so much money that they bought nearly every foreclosure in sight, mostly to rent. The Blackstone Group, for example, spent $5.5bn on 32,000 homes across America, according to the firm. American Homes 4 Rent, the California-based real estate investment trust founded by self-storage billionaire Wayne Hughes, spent $3.3bn, on over 19,000 houses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese Wall Street guys employed huge dollars,\u201d Brzeski said. \u201cThese firms came to the courthouse steps and bought everything in sight. So the low to mid-market dried up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brzeski said he had originally been wary of the high-end market, because of the much bigger sums involved and thus greater risk. But then in 2011 he financed the purchase of a house in West Hollywood that brought him a lot of profit.<\/p>\n
Source: \bREUTERS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jan Brzeski stands in a sun-filled, beautifully refurbished living room high in the Hollywood Hills, looking out at a swimming pool and, miles below, stunning views of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Brzeski is a private money lender running an investment firm in Los Angeles that provides loans to house flippers, investors who buy a home, refurbish it, and sell it on at a profit. Many flippers go to money lenders because they can\u2019t get banks to provide such short-term, quick financing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}