Why should you invest in Florida?

Subprimes were particularly bad in Florida. We had all kinds of people set up, like call centers, pretending to be companies, to receive the calls from banks that were verifying people's employment. The creativity was the biggest here. 

• We had a building boom. Miami downtown built over 80k units in the 2003-2005 period, bought by speculators, flipping contracts. 
• Then rental apartments converted to condos, so tenants could buy their condos, investors wanted two, three, as many as they could handle. I mean there was zero downpayment, zero closing costs, no income verification, and if so, well, we had that covered. 
• Then, when everything stopped, I focused on picking up the pieces, by helping people with their short sales and also REO’s. 
• We would approach people who were in foreclosure and would ask to do a short sale, to save their credit. 

But because of the way the rules worked in the Florida court system, banks could not foreclose, so it would take 4-5 years before a bank could foreclose on someone. This caused terrible mayhem in the court system. Retired judges came back to the bench to help out. It wasn't till 2013 that the law was changed and they were able to foreclose on people.