For the past three days I’ve been attending the CDPE Momentum event in Tempe, Arizona.

What is a CDPE you ask? A CDPE is a Certified Distressed Property Expert (or certifiable depending on who you ask!) A CDPE is a Realtor who has chosen to undergo training specific to negotiating home sales where the home may be worth less than the value of outstanding loans on it. This is a “short sale”.

So, the CDPE Momentum even was a bunch of Realtors who specialize in handling short sales getting together. We had representatives from all over the country – even Alaska and Hawaii!

I’ve been to a couple of different seminars now. Most of them are dry, uninformative, and leave you wishing you had never heard about it.

In contrast, this even was fun, full of information, and I was sorry to see it end.

We covered multiple topics ranging from what the market was going to be doing in the future to determining the personality types of your co-workers.

One of the first speakers was Rick Sharga, a Senior Vice President of RealtyTrac. RealtyTrac is a company that specializes and tracking and understanding what the real estate market is doing now so that they can better see what the market will be doing tomorrow. Rick had some good and bad news for us.

First, Rick does not think that a so called “shadow inventory” of REO’s will be flooding the market anytime soon. Rick believes that the banks are too concerned with maintaining stable home prices. Personally, I agree with Rick. If it was possible for the banks to catch up with and list all of the “shadow inventory” tomorrow, home prices would plummet. The housing market would crash, and crash hard. Wall street would follow, unemployment would skyrocket, and the United States would become a third world country.

I agree with this conclusion for a couple of reasons, but it all boils down to supply and demand. Two years ago there was a glut of REO homes on the market here in Phoenix. I know because I was managing a team that was selling 75 of them. NOTHING was selling during this period. Investors were staying out of the market due to fears of the falling home prices (and prices were plummeting). Occupant buyers were either unable to secure loans, or were also concerned with the rapidly dropping prices. REO’s were competing with REO’s to see who could have the lowest price on the market – and still nothing was selling.

If the “shadow inventory” were to hit the market tomorrow, we’d have the same exact situation. REO’s would be competing with REO’s to see who could be the lowest priced home on the market with the highest days on the market. Since the bank wants the best return on investment possible, even if they *could* get everything on the market tomorrow (which would be a logistics nightmare in and of itself), they’d have strong incentives to slow the supply, maintaining demand and home prices.

However, there was bad news. One of Rick’s charts had the dates for the next wave of ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) adjustments on it. They’re due to start adjusting again soon, which will lead to a whole new wave of potential foreclosures.

Luckily, Realtors and banks are now better trained and equipped to help people who want to avoid foreclosure.

Now just to give the public the knowledge to regain control of their future.