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Preforeclosure Listings Services - Frequently Asked Questions (faqs) About Preforeclosure Listings
Category: BusinessPreforeclosure listings services provide an invaluable time-saving tool for every real estate investor who is looking to research the available pool of real estate preforeclosures in your area. Should you subscribe to them? Here is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) to help you make an informed decision:
What is a preforeclosure listings service?
A preforeclosure listings service is dedicated to identifying all of the homes that have gone into preforeclosure in one or more counties across a state or across the nation.
What kind of information does a preforeclosure listings service provide?
What they do generally is compile all of the relevant information about a preforeclosure case that would be used in order to assess whether or not it is a deal worth investing in.
What information about each home does a preforeclosure list contain?
Listings services may vary, but generally they all provide the following pieces of information which are of vital interest to the preforeclosure investor:
- Home owners name
- Property address
- The mortgages (first and / or second) currently against the property
- The originating and / or present balance of the mortgages
- Judgments / liens against the property
- When the preforeclosure action (known as a lis pendens or a notice of default) was initiated
- What county the property is located in
- What stage of the foreclosure process is the property in
- Document record numbers so the mortgages can be referenced by the county recorder’s office
- Opening bid (also known as the “Judgment Amount”) of the property
- When the last payment was made against the house
- Information about the house:
- square footage
- number of bedrooms
- number of bathrooms
- the year the house was built
- how big is the lot on which the house was built
- what type of residence is it: single family home, townhome, condominium
- Property tax payment amount
- Property tax payment status
- Tax assessed value of the house
- Property “parcel number” as recorded by the county
- When the property was last sold and for how much
As is evident from the list above, preforeclosure investing is about a lot more than just finding a deal and making an offer on it. Not every preforeclosure is a deal worth pursuing. A deal is only worth pursuing if you are able to fix it up and flip it for a healthy profit margin or if there is enough equity in the house that you could earn a healthy positive cash flow by fixing it up and renting it out.
Why should I pay to subscribe to a list when I can do the research for free?
There is the old adage: Time is money. You most certainly could go to the county recorder’s office and the county court record’s office and manually view all of the preforeclosure files and research them one by one for the information that you are looking for. However, government offices across the United States are only open during business hours and if you work during that time at a regular day job, your time for doing the research will be extremely limited. Depending on the volume of foreclosures in your county, you would need as few as four to as many as twenty hours per week to drive there, sit in front of the computer terminals or request to view the hard copies of the records, take notes on all of them, and then go home. And then after you do your research, don’t forget that you would need to drive by the good leads to qualify them visually. When would you have time to do all of this?
This is where research comes in handy. The purpose of these preforeclosure listings services is to provide you with a list that will save you the time and hassle of having to go to the county recorder’s office and research all of the government court records manually. The service provider makes it their business to go out and do all of the research for you. All of the research is done for you so that you can make an informed decision about which deals are worth pursuing and which ones are not, and for the deals that are worth pursuing, what type of funding you would need in order to do the deal. Most preforeclosure listings services are updated daily if not weekly, so you will always get up-to-date information.
How do preforeclosure listings services compile their data? Where do they get it from?
Depending on the county, they will send out teams of researchers to each county court house to conduct all of the research and compile it electronically into a database. In other counties, this data is stored electronically on government mainframe computers and the researchers will request to download this data in its raw format and then compile it in a format that is ready for you to use.
Many listings providers are now online on the Internet and thus you can subscribe to them for a flat monthly or weekly fee to receive listings by e-mail or by logging onto their website and searching for listings based on the criteria of your choosing.
Foreclosures are on the rise. Why spend your valuable time at the courthouse researching government records when you can “outsource” your foreclosure research and analyze deals in real-time online, to weed out the good deals from the bad, and then spend your time actively pursuing those deals? Subscribe to http://www.ForeclosureDataWeb.com - the most trusted online foreclosure listings service on the Internet.
Tags: foreclosure, preforeclosure