Three months after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, well-known local real estate investor Belton Mouras Jr. is offering to share his financial acumen.

Mouras, the self-described "duplex king of Sacramento," is promoting a real estate seminar for a dozen investors this month. The price to attend: $5,000 a head.

It's true there are few who know as much about buying foreclosed homes and other rental properties as Mouras. He has been at it for 20 years, claiming to have bought, managed and sold 1,000 properties.

Still, in an August bankruptcy filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Sacramento, Mouras reported that he owes $85.9 million – and has only $55.4 million in assets.

Mouras didn't respond to a telephone call about his weekend investment seminar dubbed "Belton's Real Estate Investor Bootcamp."

But his Gold River bankruptcy attorney, David Meegan, said the Sacramento investor, like many in real estate, simply got caught up in an unprecedented crash.

He still qualifies to offer advice, said Meegan. In a statement Thursday, he said, "Mr. Mouras is offering to share with others his extensive real estate investment experience obtained over many years, both in good times and in bad, in finding properties to acquire at the right price, raising money to purchase them, rehabilitating them if needed, managing them and holding them for long-term investment or disposing of them for a short-term profit."

Win for Sutter Brownstones

Midtown Sacramento's Sutter Brownstones got a nice tip of the hat this week as an outstanding U.S. architectural accomplishment. It won a merit award in the infill development category in Builder magazine's 2009 Builder's Choice Awards.

The 28-home project on N Street between 26th and 27th streets received 21 other merit awards in categories including custom homes, resorts, remodels and senior housing. Builder, a Washington, D.C., magazine, calls its annual contest the "housing industry's oldest, largest and most prestigious design awards program."

Sutter Brownstones, developed by a Sacramento partnership, LoftWorks, sold out within 16 months of its April 2008 debut at prices ranging from $370,000 to $625,000.

Sacramento architectural firm LPAS designed the project. Portland-based Walsh & Forster built the complex. Among notable residents is Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge.

Buy our houses, please

Here's a question to keep aging baby boom homeowners from sleeping well. Who is going to buy your expensive house when you want to retire to the hills?

Surprisingly, this issue arose Wednesday during a California Research Bureau forum in Sacramento about 1978's property tax-cutting ballot measure, Proposition 13.

California's always-dependable supply of homebuyer migrants from cold climates is no longer assured, said demographer Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California. Birthrates in Mexico also have fallen, meaning fewer arrivals from the south. Myers said native-born Californians became a majority of the state's population in 2002 for the first time in modern history.

And that group of highly educated California college graduates who might pay you top dollar in 2020?

"The problem is they went to school here – a California school – and we are going to reap what we've sowed," he said. That student may have dropped out, underperformed or been unable to get financial aid for college.

Careful, he said. Lack of investment in the future, the overriding legacy of a voter revolt in 1978, may yet come home to roost – just as elders put out for-sale signs.

Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.