Foreclosure Tours

Via the Housing Bubble Blog, an interesting tour:

Tonight Stockton will get another dose of national attention as a foreclosure hot spot in yet another round in the TV spotlight.

This time, though, say the producers of the "Deals on the Bus" series by Discovery's TLC channel, the documentary-style series that premieres at 10:30 p.m. today on Comcast cable will show a new real estate trend: People riding in tour buses in the quest to buy nice yet affordable homes in communities hard hit by the housing downturn.

"It's kind of like speed dating for homes," said executive producer Carlos Ortiz of Actual Reality Pictures, an independent Los Angeles-based film company that has filmed such reality-genre programming as "Flip That House" for TLC.

That's old news in Stockton, thanks in part to Stockton real estate agent Cesar Dias, an agent and loan officer at Approved Financial & Real Estate Center.

He drew a burst of national media attention last year with the creation of his RepoHomeTour.com tour bus - a brightly colored vehicle that gives potential homebuyers a look at some of the top foreclosure-purchase prospects on any given weekend.

TLC liked the idea of creating a program that focuses on new good ideas out there for real estate, said Dustin Smith, TLC's director of publicity.

...The series has 18 shows in the can, with bus tours filmed in Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston, and not all the properties are foreclosures, Ortiz said.

...One of the local stars will be Albert Jimenez, a Stockton meter changer for PG&E, who is staging a family party tonight during the show premiere because he not only bought a nice 2,400-square-foot foreclosure home in Stockton for $125,000 - "The home looks so good you'd think it was new" - but he's also doing it on national TV.

...In this market, that means a 5 percent 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage of $903 a month, including property taxes and insurance, for Jimenez, who makes about $60,000 annually.

"That's only about $150 more than my apartment was, and it's three times the size," he said.

...Ortiz said the show aims to capture without manipulation the real action of those looking to buy their first homes, and the focus goes on the chase for a home and the positive opportunities in a down residential real estate market.

Contrast that with Australia's "60 Minutes" take last year on the same Dias foreclosure bus tour in Stockton, where the reporter described the tour-bus riders as "vultures - here to pick the bones of the subprime crisis."