Friday, October 13, 2006

Step By Step Procedure in finding a Foreclosure Home

Step By Step Procedure in finding a Foreclosure Home

Yesteraday, I get a call from my friend who was begging me for help in finding him a reasonably priced home in Southern California.

As if there is such a thing out here :) Just kidding!

Anyhow, here is the exact steps we took and it really was about 2 to 3 hours of work and we found 7 possible canditates. If you want a foreclosure home, even if you don't have a list of foreclosed homes, all you do is follow the system below.

1- Identify an area where you want to find the home
2- go to Craigslist.org and look for pre-foreclosed homes in your area
3- Write these down for further research
4- Now go to the online version of your local neswpaper and do some searching
5- Next go to Yahoo Real Estate and do some searching around in there
6- Now, if you have a foreclosure listing service like this one, then do some additional research
Note: We are just gathering addresses, names and phone numbers up to this point
7- Now, you have several homes to dig into. You've written the names and addresses, prices etc. You need to hit the phones.
8- Call the homeowner or the real estate broker and start asking questions. Don't get too personal. I know this is scary for the beginners, but I promise you, it will get easier as you do more.
9- Ask the following questions:
a- Minimum asking price
b- Are the taxes current
c- Would they carry a second or third
d- Would the seller consider a "wrap around"?
e- Would the seller consider an option to but?
f- If the property is in foreclosure, when is the sale date?
g- Is the enough time to close the deal?
h- Any other information that you think might be helpful
i- Write good notes!
10- Now that you have gathered additional information on each home, you need to check for property values. For this, we use Zillow.com which I blogged about here.
11- So go to Zillow.com and plug in the address and information for each selected property.
12- For a little more information on the high priced home sales in a city, use the "heat map" feature in zillow.com
13- Now we are almost ready to make some moves here
a- we have researched homes
b- we have called the homeowner or the RE Broker and asked questions
c- we researched the propert values in a given neighborhoud
d- now is the time to make our offers
e- make offers at a maximum of 65% to 75% of the average prices in an area
...PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO SQUARE FOOTAGE OF THE HOMES
14- If you fail, start the process from step number 1.

This is exactly what I would do if I was starting out. If you are more advanced, then by all means, get some additional paid tools to speed up your research and success.

Happy investing :)

Visit House Foreclosure and Investing Blog to read Forclosure Experts discuss Foreclosure Investing and Strategies on a daily basis.

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