In a real estate advice column this weekend, Everett Herald reporter Steve Tytler explains the difficulty of finding good foreclosure deals in Seattle’s still-at-least-lukewarm market:
Question: Where can I learn about investing in foreclosures?D.E., Renton
Answer: There are some truly extraordinary bargains to be found in the foreclosure market. Unfortunately, finding these bargains is like finding a needle in a haystack. I know, because I have tried to find them myself. To listen to the late-night TV real estate hucksters, you’d think people in foreclosure are just waiting to give their house away for half its fair market value. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Think about it for a minute. If you lost your job and fell behind on your mortgage payments, are you going to hand me the keys to your house just because I’ve shown up on your doorstep to save you from foreclosure? Probably not. Most people want to keep their homes, and in the vast majority of cases, they find a way to come up with enough money to head off the foreclosure auction.
Or if they can’t raise the money, they put their home up for sale through a real estate agent and attempt to recoup as much of their equity as possible before the foreclosure auction.
It’s true that as long as the market is at least a little warm, there just aren’t going to be many deals in foreclosures. However, I think we all know what will happen when things level off and/or start to decline—combined with rising interest rates… That will be the time to be in the market for foreclosure properties.
(Steve Tytler, Everett Herald, 04.23.2006)