Are Paid Foreclosure Listings Really Worth It?

October 28th, 2009 | by admin |

If you are just getting into the foreclosure market, you will notice that there are a few different types of foreclosure listing services. Paid and free. You obviously want to minimize your costs, so you start off by searching through the free foreclosure listing services first. How can it cost you anything if it is free? Well, you have to remember that your time is not free, and you might be wasting your time looking through a free foreclosure listing service.

Most of the general free foreclosure listing services that I find are not worth spending your time on unless you are just messing around. If you are serious about finding a foreclosure, it can usually be well worth the investment to pay for a premium foreclosure listing service. When it comes to foreclosure listing services, you really get what you pay for. The free ones are often full of out-dated listings, or just plain inaccurate or incomplete data. A handful of the foreclosure listing services that are labeled as “free” will require you to upgrade to a premium membership ($$$) if you want to view the details for a listing. What a scam! Why bother wasting your time.

The only foreclosure listings that I have found to be helpful are the bank-owned directories that are provided by the banks or other financial institutions. These might include Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, etc. Each of theses companies will probably have some sort of bank owned listing section on their website. They want maximum exposure, so they won’t charge you to view the listings. The only problem is that there are a bunch of different lists that you will have to go through. If there are five foreclosures in your neighborhood, you might have to go to five different websites to find out about them all.

Paid foreclosure listings are typically worth the money if you are a serious investor. Yes, all of the information on their websites is technically publicly available elsewhere for free, but they do you the service of making sense of it all, compiling it and organizing it in a fashion that makes it easy for you to search and understand. If you are successful buying and selling foreclosures for a profit, the $50 per month nominal fee is going to seem negligible. If that fee gets you thousands in profit, it is well worth the investment.

However, if you are not a professional investor and aren’t sure if you are going to be buying a foreclosure soon, but just want to browse the market to see what is out there, you might want to avoid the paid foreclosure listings. The issue is that most have some sort of “Trial” offer. Unfortunately, you have to cancel before the trial ends or else you start getting billed the monthly rate.

More foreclosure news.

Tom Noonan

http://www.articlesbase.com/real-estate-articles/are-paid-foreclosure-listings-really-worth-it-754459.html

  1. 4 Responses to “Are Paid Foreclosure Listings Really Worth It?”

  2. By eric on Oct 28, 2009 | Reply

    Worth Paying for Foreclosure Information?
    I’ve been digging around a lot of free listings and i feel like I’m looking for a needle in a haystack? Just wondering if anyone has tried other options and what their experiences were?

    Thanks

  3. By knowitall on Oct 28, 2009 | Reply

    There are dozens of free Rea Estate websites listing all houses for sale including foreclosures. You can also find the info of houses to be foreclosed on in the legal section of the newspaper for your area. You do not need to pay for this info. You also could contact a realtor that specializes in foreclosures and let them get the info for you.
    References :

  4. By Help Is Here! on Oct 28, 2009 | Reply

    You don’t have to pay for foreclosure listings.

    Call any local real estate office or agent where you want to buy and ask them for a list.
    References :

  5. By john on Oct 28, 2009 | Reply

    These guys are definitely right that the information is out there for free. However, I think I was in the same boat as you. I was interested in a few different markets and it’s a lot of work to pick up the phone and call all these different offices in different cities and have them send you their individual limited lists for that particular area. Personally, I stumbled on this website that had good reviews of different services and ended up using one of them for a couple months, just saved me so much time to have everything in one place and easy to search.

    http://www.foreclosurewebsitescomparisons.com

    Free resources are great if you can’t afford the subscription, but this was just a better option for me.
    References :

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