patrick.net

By Bertha Coombs

Reporter

CNBC

updated 12:12 p.m. HT, Thurs., April 7, 2005

He’s a roofer and she owns a hair salon, and now Paul and Caren Matera are applying their entrepreneurial skills to New York’s red-hot housing market.

After attending a $3,000 real estate seminar, last July the Materas bought a little bungalow on Long Island. They sold it two months later and made a 50 percent profit. Since then, the couple has taken equity from their own home and invested in a half dozen properties now worth over $1 million — much of it pre-construction properties in red hot Florida developments...

Hard statistics are tough to come by, but one in six purchasers surveyed by the California Association of Realtors in 2004 said they were purchasing a home as an investment or for tax purposes — that’s a record 16.2 percent.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7405028/

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VH1 needs to do a real estate "Where are they Now" show that showcases people who got caught up in the real estate frenzy of the mid-aughts and have lost lots of money after the real estate bubble popped.  I am truly curious to what happened this entrepreneurial couple and others.  Did these flippers become floppers who are flapping to stay afloat?  Did they sell at the right time and rent at the peak?  Where are they now?

#housing