Friday, September 18, 2009

Locating high potential pre-foreclosure and foreclosure property investments is a crucial part of the business of pre-foreclosure and foreclosure investing. Especially when it comes to pre-foreclosures, a lot rests on your ability to find promising properties as soon as possible… and before any or many other property investors! Unless you hire someone to find potential investments for you (a good idea in many cases) here are the main sources of information about pre-foreclosure and foreclosure properties that you’ll want to be familiar with.

1. The Local Newspaper

Your local newspaper will typically have a “legal notice” section where you will find, among other things, notices that a certain lender has filed, or is filing, a notice of foreclosure on a particular property. This basically indicates that a property has gone into pre-foreclosure. Alternatively, newspapers also publish notices of trustee sales and foreclosure auctions that are about to occur, including the time, date and place.

2. County Recorder

The local county recorder will keep a database of notices of default. Depending on the county recorder in question, you may be able to search this database online. For example, you may be able to search by “document type” and get all the notices of default, including the relevant owner names and document numbers.

If the online database does not provide details of the loans and properties to which these notices relate, you can still note down the relevant owner names and document numbers, and take this with you to the county recorder’s office. Once there you can review the corresponding documents (i.e. notice of default or Lis Pendens, as the case may be). These will give you the loan details and the address of the properties being subject to foreclosure proceedings.

3. Foreclosure Listing Sites

There are various companies offering lists of foreclosures on their websites. In most cases, you’ll need to pay a fee in order to access such information. An up-to-date foreclosure listing site can certainly save you time in locating information about properties undergoing foreclosure. However, just be sure that the information is, in fact, up to date. There is no advantage – and in fact there is a disadvantage – to paying money for out-of-date information.

4. Property Finders

Finally, you can hire a property finder or “bird dog” to do the leg-work required to find suitable pre-foreclosure or foreclosure properties for you. Rather than you do all the research, you can hire such individuals to scour the newspaper, county recorder’s database and/or foreclosure listing sites.

Even better, though, is to hire someone who has connections in the area you are interested in investing, and who is on good terms with the real estate agents in the area. That way, such hired guns may be able to uncover – and reveal to you – new opportunities as soon as they crop up.

These are the four main sources of information about foreclosure and pre-foreclosure properties. For more details about how to uncover and profit from pre-foreclosure and foreclosure investment opportunities check out www.ForeclosuresUnleashed.net.