How to Find Foreclosed Homes for Sale
In this article, I’ll explain how you can easily foreclosed homes for sale in your area. I’ll also tell you how to have this foreclosure data sent directly to your email inbox, without any extra effort from you.
There’s a flood of foreclosure activity across the United States right now. If you’ve been watching the news at all, I don’t need to tell you the reasons for this. As a result, there are more foreclosed homes for sale in most cities than every before. Here are the latest stats, as reported by RealtyTrac (see link above):
- More than 340,000 foreclosure filings took place across the U.S. in March 2009
- Overall foreclosure activity rose by 46 percent from March of last year
- There was one foreclosure filing for every 159 households in the first quarter of 2009
For home buyers who are looking for a good deal, this is a positive thing. Sure, those foreclosures stats represent hardship and heartache for some. But they also represent opportunity. And let’s face it — it doesn’t help the economy any to have those foreclosed homes linger on the market. The quicker they are purchased and lived in, the better!
Many first-time home buyers see these properties as a chance to save money. And they are right. If you buy a short sale property (before the actual foreclosure process), you can probably get it for less than market value. And if you buy a home at an auction (after it has been foreclosed upon), you might even get it for less.
The first question most people ask is, “How do I find foreclosed homes for sale in the area where I want to live? And for that matter, how do I find pre-foreclosure homes that might be priced low?” Well, there are several ways you could do this.
When a mortgage lender or bank files the initial paperwork to start this process, it gets filed with the county courts (in the county where the home is located). So, in theory, you could make daily or weekly trips down to the county courthouse to find foreclosure and pre-foreclosure homes in your area of interest. But let’s be realistic. It’s just not practical to do it this way, especially in a hot market where a lot of buyers are out shopping for foreclosed homes for sale.
Fortunately, there’s a better way to find foreclosed properties for sale in your area. If you use one of the major foreclosure-tracking services, such as RealtyTrac, you can follow all of the activity in your area with very little effort. These web-based services will send you notifications whenever a new filing takes place in the area you are watching, so you’ll be among the first to know about recent foreclosure activity.
I highly recommend signing up for such a service, because it’s the only way to compete with savvy investors who know how to snatch these homes up quickly. If you want to find foreclosure homes for sale early enough to make an offer or a bid, then you need constant access to local data. Another reason I recommend RealtyTrac is that they offer a free trial to new customers. This lets you evaluate the service before committing to it, which is always a good thing.
So let’s sum up some of the key points we’ve made above.
There are record breaking-numbers of foreclosure properties for sale across the United States right now. These properties can be a good opportunity for buyers, because they are often priced below their true market values. You can find foreclosed homes in your area by making regular visits to your county courthouse or clerk’s office, or you can have this data sent to you by email. If you want to compete with all of the other buyers out there, you need to sign up for a service like RealtyTrac — it’s the best way to find local foreclosures in a timely manner.
Foreclosure | Brandon | 
April 25, 2009 8:32 am