How to Find Bank Foreclosed Homes for Sale

Article Summary: Foreclosure fever is starting to infect a lot of home buyers. But before you buy a bank-owned property, you need to know about the listing. So in today’s post, I’ll explain how you can find foreclosure homes for sale near you.

It took a while, but first-time home buyers are starting to realize something I’ve been saying for a long time. Bank foreclosed homes are a great opportunity to save money. Better still, there are plenty of these homes for sale in most cities. And even better still, you are helping the economy by buying bank foreclosed homes for sale in your area.

I made three key points in that opening statement. So let me address each one of them in turn.

• It’s possible to save a lot of money by purchasing a home that has been foreclosed upon, because the banks want to sell them fast. In many cases, banks will price these homes below their current market values in order to sell them quickly. This is where the potential for savings comes into the picture.
• There are more foreclosed homes for sale right now than at any point in history. If you’ve seen the news at during the last year, I don’t need to tell you the reason for this. The bottom line is that there are plenty of foreclosure properties to choose from in most cities. I’ll talk about how to find them in just a moment.
• When you purchase a bank foreclosed home, you are helping the economy from the neighborhood level upward. Here’s why. When an area has a high number of foreclosure properties, it drags down property values across the board. These homes also tend to be neglected, which depresses neighborhood values even more. So when you buy a bank-owned property (and ideally spruce it up), you are helping to turn the neighborhood around.

So there you have it — three good reason to buy foreclosure homes. A lot of first-time home buyers are starting to realize this. As a result, they are getting into new homes with affordable mortgages, and much sooner than they thought possible.

Coincidentally, I saw a segment on CNN while writing this article that showed a family moving into a home that was formerly out of their price range. In just three years, the value of the property had dropped by $200,000. How did they get such a good deal? Two reasons: (1) because values have dropped all over the country; and (2) because it was a bank foreclosed home, and competitively priced to sell quickly.

Finding Foreclosures for Sale Near You

You can’t buy one of these homes without knowing when they come on the market. So if you’re serious about buying a foreclosure, you’ll need access to listing data for bank foreclosed homes in your area. This is important now, but it will become even more important in the coming months. Why? Because the markets will slowly start to pick up again, and there’s going to be more people competing for those foreclosures for sale in your area. If you want to bid on one of these properties, or make an offer to the bank that owns it, you need to move fairly quickly.

This brings us up to the point of this lesson. If you want to purchase a foreclosure home, you need to sign up for one of the big listing / data services. You need to stay on top the market and move quickly. You need to know when bank foreclosed homes are newly listed for sale in your area. Sure, you can make trips down to the county courthouse to search their records. A foreclosure is part of the public record, after all. But this method is too slow and cumbersome to be a viable strategy.

That’s why you should sign up for a tracking service such as RealtyTrac. You can do a free trial to get started, and you can continue the service for a small monthly fee. And trust me — if you are serious about this kind of real estate strategy, you need to stay ahead of the curve. That’s what these foreclosure tracking services do. They give you quick and easy access to bank foreclosed homes for sale in your area.

Join a Foreclosed Homes Tracking Service

I’ve just outlined the primary benefits of these services. Speed and convenience. And if you choose one of the top-three tracking services available today, you’ll have the benefit of reliable data as well. That’s why I recommend using RealtyTrac for this process. Their website is easy to use, and you get listing data sent to you by email. You can sign up for a free trial below. Check it out for yourself and see what you think.

In closing, I’d like to stress the importance of researching this process before you jump into it. The same goes for any major financial decision. Yes, there is the potential to save a lot of money when buying a bank owned property. But there’s also the potential for making mistakes. There are dozens of websites online today that offer advice on purchasing a foreclosed home for sale, and you can easily find them by doing a Google search. You can also find plenty of books on this subject at your local bookstore, or at Amazon.com.