Best Celebrity Scoop

When “Nightline” first met Odell Barnes, the man known to some as the Foreclosure King, he was on his cell phone constantly, buying foreclosed homes by the dozens from his front porch in South Carolina. (ABC News)A year later, he’s still answering the phone, but he’s off his porch and in Detroit. “It’s too big for me,” he said of the current housing crisis. “One thousand houses a week? It outgrows you.” Sitting on another front porch — this time at a burned-out house in Detroit — Barnes has plunged face first into the nation’s housing crisis. He’s always bought houses in bulk from banks, but what’s changed is that, in the last year, mortgage insurer Fannie Mae has begun dumping foreclosed houses on him. The original owners are gone and Fannie Mae and the banks can’t sell any other way.