The Foreclosure Expert – How to find foreclosures

My favorite saying is “The Internet is Your Friend”. There is so much information on the internet that are public records. You just have to have a lot of patience and a lot of time to find it. I will show you how I use the county recorded documents to find pre foreclosures on the Maricopa County, Arizona web site. Hopefully you can find the same information on your county’s web site. If not, the documents are available at the county records office in hard copy form.

When someone gets behind on their mortgage, and they don’t work out a deal with the mortgage company then the house will be scheduled for auction. This document that is filed is called a “notice of trustee sale”. The notice will be posted on the house and also sent by registered mail to the original trustors. From the date of the “notice of trustee sale” to the date of the auction, is about 3 months.

First, go to the recorded docs page of the county web site, in Maricopa County, Arizona, that page is http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/. On the pull down menu of the “Document Code” field select “Notice of Trustee Sale”, enter yesterdays date into the “Begin Date”. Select search.

The next page gives you a list of all the recorded “Notice of Trustee Sale”, or pre foreclosures, starting on the date you entered. On the date that I entered, there was 296 listed. Now this list only contains the Recording Number, Recording Date, and Document Code. You have to open the document to get the rest of the information. Double click on the Recording Number of the document. There is a buy button, but do not buy anything. The information is available for free in the “view unofficial”. Double click on the number of pages. This will open the scanned document. What you want to know is the date of the sale (auction), the location of the auction, the address of the property, the owners which will be the trustor, the original principal balance and anything else you want to know.

I like to put the information into an excel spread sheet. Gather as much or as little as you want. After several hours you have a fairly good list of pre foreclosed homes.

Now you can mail your yellow lined letter in your colored envelope, or you can hand deliver it. Meet the homeowners in person and develop rapport. You might be able to work out a short sale with the mortgage company, who knows, if they like you enough, they might just give you the house.

Here is a video showing how to find pre foreclosures on the Maricopa.gov website.

This is how I have found a few foreclosures in neighborhoods that are around my house. This takes some time but it does work and many times you can get a home even before the house goes into pre-foreclosure. Pre-foreclosures are homes before they are sold at auction or actually owned by the bank.

First I would hand write on a white piece of paper “Hello, I am interested in purchasing your home. Please call me at 555-999-9999 (my phone number). Thanks, Susan Boehm”. Then I would take a yellow lined pad, tear out all the pages and then copy my hand written note onto the yellow pages. I would also buy envelopes that had color. Out of all the envelopes that you get every day, how many are purple or green? Probably none. This is just one way that you can be different from the crowd.

Make sure you have a pen and notepad with you all the time. You never know when you are going to find a prospective house. Don’t drive around a neighborhood that you will be unsafe, besides you don’t want a home there anyway. What you are looking for are homes that look bad from the outside. The grass is uncut, the bushes haven’t been watered, it needs a coat of paint. When you find a home like this, write down the address. You will need the house number and the full street name, ex. 1234 West Somewhere Ave.

When you get home get onto the county accessors page, in Maricopa County, Arizona the link is http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/. Choose “Advanced Search Options”. On the next page enter the house number and name of the street. Press submit.

What this will give you is the name of the person who owns the house and their address. It may be different from the address of the home which means the home could be a rental. It will also give you the purchase price and when it was purchased.

So now take one of you yellow lined pages and put it into you colored envelop, hand address the envelope, put your return address on the envelope, put a regular stamp on it and mail it.

Now you could wait for a reply, but you may not get one, so move on to the next home.

Here is a video to show you how to do this.