Multimedia House Listings

Investors purchase stocks online. Will they buy somebody’s mortgage over the Web as well? A start-up called BigBidder.com hopes so.

The backers of BigBidder already run fre.com), a site that sells homes online.

Paul Lyons, a senior vice president of the company, says BigBidder is auctioning off home loans owned by banks, mortgage companies and other investors. The loans are both performing and non-performing—--the latter meaning the homeowners aren’t making their monthly payments. Lyons says much of the site’s sales are in “re-performing” loans, meaning the home owner was delinquent until the lender changed the terms of the loan and now the borrower is making payments again.

BigBidder charges the buyer a fee of from 1% to 5% of the loan purchase price, depending on the size of the loan. Some recent deals include an $83,000 first mortgage carrying a 9.8% interest rate on a 3 bedroom house in Gas City, Indiana. It sold for less than half of the loan amount. Meanwhile, a $100,000 adjustable rate second mortgage on a home in North Hills, California currently carrying a rate of 6.2% sold for just 25 cents on the dollar. Both of those loans were performing.

Lyons says documentation, such as the original loan application and credit reports on the borrower, is available on the Web site. I’m not recommending anyone dive into this kind of investment, certainly not without a lot of thought and research. Judging by those discounts the sellers don’t think these loans are going to get paid back in full any time soon.

I stopped by Dwell on Design, a home design show sponsored by Dwell magazine at the Los Angeles Convention Center this weekend. This was the kind of event I expected to be really slow during the Great Recession. It cost $25 to get in and had a lot of cool, but pricey products on for sale, everything from $3,000 Ligne Roset arm chairs (and they are cool) to my bottle of Vitamin Water which cost $3.80 including tax (convention center pricing). There was actually a pretty decent-sized turnout.

The big hit seemed to the handful of prefab homes on display. Green Inc. is a Los Angeles company that makes dwellings out of converted shipping containers. That’s one of their homes above.

Modern-Shed makes the most stylish sheds you’ve ever seen. Like the Green Inc. structures, Modern-Shed’s products start at around $10,000. The company wisely positions them not as a hipper replacement for the $1,000 aluminum shed you could buy at Sears but as a low-cost addition to your home. While my wife and I liked that idea, my mother-in-law and niece didn’t seem to too keen on sleeping in the shed.

Also generating a lot of interest was a 400 square foot cottage made from reclaimed wood and other products. The cottage was very cool, kind of a cross between a shabby chic country house and the Unibomber's cabin. It’s made by an Austin company called Reclaimed Space, which auctioned off that actual home on eBay. The winning bidder paid $75,000. I remember one of the staffers in the house saying that home typically sold for $60,000, although in this case half the proceeds went to Habitat for Humanity.

When the easy money was flowing, you could get a great deal on a mortgage from just about anyone. But in today's credit-challenged world, all the avenues for finding a mortgage come with their own set of problems.

Tropicana Atlantic City Casino & Resort is set to come under new ownership, just over one year after owner Tropicana Entertainment L.L.C. filed for Chapter 11 protection. But it's not a big-name gaming company that will take over the property's reigns. The United States Bankruptcy Court in Camden, N.J., has green-lighted a "stalking horse" asset purchase agreement calling for pre-petition lenders--a group that includes billionaire investor Carl Icahn's Icahn Capital--to take hold of the asset in return for forgiving $200 million of debt owed by Tropicana.

The frozen credit market and shattered economy have caused the interruption or outright cancellation of development project after development project across the country, but such is not the case for an unlikely 1.8 million-square-foot mixed-use endeavor in Plymouth, Mass., about 40 miles south of Boston. Having just secured the Plymouth Planning Board's approval of a master site plan, developers of Plymouth Rock Studios can now proceed with on- and off-site activities for the fully funded, $500 million film and television studio compound.

Hartz Mountain Industries has agreed to a lease deal with Breeze-Eastern Corp., a publicly-traded designer of lifting devices for military and civilian aircraft.

Ory Schwartz, senior director of NorthMarq Capital's Los Angeles office, has arranged an $18 million first mortgage for Meadowridge Apartments, a 176-unit multi-family complex located in Santa Clarita, Calif.

The combination of a deep recession and widespread law-enforcement funding cuts will most likely spell a banner summer for burglars. If your house makes a good target - it's upscale, off the beaten path, and in or near a city - an alarm system is your best defense, according to Temple University economics professor Simon Hakim, who studies security and policing. Installing one will reduce your risk of a break-in by two-thirds. To determine what you really need, follow the guidelines below.

Newly-formed value-added real estate fund KABR Real Estate Investment Partners L.L.C. has purchased a 235,000-square-foot office building at 85 Challenger Road in Ridgefield Park, N.J., from AIG.

Southern California-based private real estate investment firm Hager Pacific Properties has leased a 108,700-square-foot office/industrial property in Ontario, Calif., to Kim Lighting, a division of Hubbell Lighting Inc.