Recycling . . . . Real Estate?

. . . And now my other great love is about to be revealed, besides buying stuff used for my house: it's buying used houses. To me this is one of the ultimate recycling adventures - taking housing that has been used (or abused) and making it your own.
I have purchased three houses and 1 empty lot in the last 25 years. I have given a lot of thought to tearing down my current house and building a new one on our lot but the main reason I have decided not to is because I don't want all that rubble and trash going to a landfill. (That, plus the additional expense of building from scratch when you can re-hab for less.)
A companion fascination for me is the whole industry of auctioning residential real estate. In other countries such as Australia, auctions have been a mainstay of selling for years. Auctioning has not caught on in a big way in the United States residential markets . . . . yet. With the sub-prime mortgage fiasco I expect that will change in the near future.
There are a couple of residential auction companies in existence now and you can look for more to come up as more and more pre-foreclosure and foreclosure homes need to be moved quickly.
Just try a quick web search using your favorite search engine on "residential real estate auctions (your state or city here)" and see what you find.

Happy Holidays, Resale Retail Style

It's been several weeks since my last update, and I've been very busy with my paying job. But I wanted to share my favorite Resale Retail way to help others shop for you for holidays, birthdays, weddings, or any other gift-giving occasion while saving resources including out-of-pocket cash.

1. Create a new e-mail account for yourself at the e-mail provider of your choice (Yahoo, Google, etc.) for example "gifts4me@gmail.com." Make sure you set a non-embarrassing, easy to remember password.
2. Go to eBay and register as a new user with that account (gifts4me@gmail.com in our example).
3. Put everything you want from eBay on the My eBay watch list under that account.
4. Give all your friends and loved ones the e-mail and password you defined in step 1 and let them log in to check out the watch list and bit on what they want to give you!

The only snag is that you can't check that e-mail account or watch list until after the event is over unless you want major spoilers to your surprise. I used this approach for Christmas last year and got a number of things from my watch list under an e-mail I created especially for that purpose. Happy green, inexpensive, eco-friendly shopping!