Starting today home "Flippers" are now welcome at the FHA.

That's right, with a glut of foreclosures plaguing the nation's neighborhoods, the FHA is temporarily removing restrictions on investors who buy and sell homes within 90 days.

It's just for one year, but Flippers are no longer persona non-grata with the government.

"FHA borrowers, because of the restrictions we are now lifting, have often been shut out from buying affordable properties," FHA Commissioner David Stevens wrote in a statement last month. "This action will enable our borrowers, especially first-time buyers, to take advantage of this opportunity."

So the FHA wants to encourage flipping and turn first-time buyers, who are already getting a tax break, into new real estate speculators? Nope, they just want to get as many foreclosed properties as possible off the market. This opens up a whole new bundle of buyers to current real estate investors who previously couldn't flip the home to a low-income borrower.

The FHA is lifting the ban for just one year and there are some rules.

You can't flip the property for more than a 20 percent profit in most cases and the transaction must be at "arms-length" so friends don't collude to drive up the home value and then snag some unknowing buyer in the end. While banks and financial institutions were always excepted from the rule, private investors, like Oregon-based Gorilla Capital, were not, so this waiver, "will allow companies like Gorilla Capital, who research, assess, and purchase homes at foreclosure auctions, to sell more homes to buyers using FHA financing," says the company's CEO John Helmick. "With an average hold time of 52 days, the FHA 90-day seasoning rule created an artificial barrier to Gorilla selling homes to the general public, and prevented a large portion of the public from accessing the value home prices offered by Gorilla Capital."

Call Brian at Urb, Inc. (847) 673-7575 to find out how you can take advantage of this one time opportunity.

If you’ve been thinking about buying a home, fixing it up and selling it for a quick profit, better proceed with caution. It’s often said that once a trend hits the news, it’s a sure sign it’s on its way out. That may not be the way to gauge the direction of the real estate market. But with a whole host of TV shows that make flipping houses look like an easy way to make a quick buck has some financial advisors concerned.

“Flipping a house” is considered by real estate industry analysts to be on title of a home for less than six months time. And in the hay days of booming real estate, “flipping” also came to mean turning a quick profit.

So now that the housing market has softened with all the Chicago foreclosures, is foreclosed home flipping a thing of the past? Not necessarily. Investors are just going to have to be a lot more careful. There will always be certain foreclosure properties for sale that are undervalued. If you can find them, give them a quick makeover and put them back on the market, it’s still possible to net some cash.

But the risks of flipping Chicago homes are much greater during a slow market. First of all, if you undertake anything more than a minor renovation, your expenses may eat up a good chunk of your foreclosures profit. While giving a home a fresh coat of paint may pay off nicely, installing granite countertops may not. Plus, if you can’t resell the home as quickly as you’d hoped, you have to be prepared to cover its carrying costs by renting it out for awhile for hopefully a positive cash flow.

if you still want to give home flipping a try Chicago, please consider Urb.Inc.’s foreclosed property listings to minimize your risk and maximize your possible reward.