Clark County’s housing market has begun to look profitable to the region’s largest buyer of foreclosed homes.
Eugene-based Gorilla Capital this month launched a three-employee operation in Vancouver and plans to open a downtown office within the next six months, said John Helmick, 51, the company’s chief executive officer. Clark County seems like the next geographically logical place for Gorilla’s expansion, along with Boise, Idaho, where the company also started doing business this month, he said.
Gorilla Capital is expanding as it builds on its strategy of buying distressed properties and reselling them.
The company has new offices in the super-high foreclosure markets of Phoenix and Florida’s Volusia County, which includes Daytona Beach, where bank-owned, three-bedroom houses can be purchased for $65,000.
o What: Eugene, Ore.-based regional buyer of foreclosed homes up for auction, which are renovated and resold for profit.
o What's new: Now operating in Clark County, with plans to open a Vancouver office.
o Web site:
oww.gorilla-capital.com.
o Employees: 30, including three in Vancouver.
o Projected 2010 sales:
$44 million.
“Arizona and Phoenix were more opportunistic expansions. The move to Clark County and Boise were geographic,” said Helmick, who started Gorilla Capital with business partner Ben Bazer, 32, in 2006. Since then, the company has grown to operate throughout Western Oregon. It skipped over the Portland housing market on purpose, Helmick said.
“The median price (in Portland) does not meet our business model. It’s too high. The homes we sell tend to be between $80,000 and $180,000,” he said.
Gorilla Capital buys, renovates and resells houses that are carefully selected to meet certain standards.
o What: Eugene, Ore.-based regional buyer of foreclosed homes up for auction, which are renovated and resold for profit.
o What’s new: Now operating in Clark County, with plans to open a Vancouver office.
o Web site:
oww.gorilla-capital.com.
o Employees: 30, including three in Vancouver.
o Projected 2010 sales:
$44 million.
“We are in the entry-level housing market. That’s our niche,” Helmick said.
He said Clark County’s foreclosure prices are more in line with the metrics required by his company, which makes a thin profit from every sale. The county’s high rate of foreclosure (the third-highest out of 39 Washington counties) was also a factor, along with the presence of potential home buyers in the market.
“The rate of foreclosure isn’t as important as housing prices and what people are earning,” Helmick said.
He expects Gorilla Capital to generate more than $44 million in sales this year, up from $23 million in 2009.
“We expect in 2010, about 10 percent of our business should be in Clark County,” Helmick said.
Helmick graduated from Yale Law School in 1988 and started the online education business ecollege.com with his brother Rob Helmick in the 1990s. The company went public in 1999 and sold for $582 million to Pearson Publishing in 2007.
