Buying foreclosures
Charleston real estate buyers are looking to buy foreclosures today as the media relentlessly reports the slowing sales in the housing market and the problems in the subprime mortgage market.
Clients of mine stumbled across an interesting property that happened to be lender owned and they thought it would be a good deal. Of course, one of the myths about foreclosures is that they are a good deal. The reality is that the lender is looking to recover as much money as possible from the bad loan. But in this particular case, if you overlook the fact that someone stole the heating and air conditioning unit (the house wasn't in a bad neighborhood, just some bad people knew the house was vacant and they thought they could and did steal it), the house was reasonably priced and my clients decided to make an offer.
I just got a call from the other agent telling me that he couldn't submit the offer because his submittal form was missing from the lender's website. There is another offer but he told me that my client's offer looked better to him but that didn't mean my clients would get it either. Of course, as he tries to get the lender to put the form back up, some other offers could come in and my clients could lose just because of the delay in submission.
It seems to me that with all the news about the significant amount of property that will be REO that the lenders had better put better systems in place in order to dispose of the real estate in a more orderly manner.
As to some of the websites offering this housing classification, from what I've seen, most are sadly lacking. Many offer little to no information without requiring registration and as I've cautioned before, there are many good sites that provide you with some good information before requiring registration. Finally, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is.