If you're getting ready to buy a house, whether it's your first home or an investment property, it seems easiest to just visit your local real estate office and find out what they have for sale. But did you know that you can save tens of thousands of dollars buying a home, if you buy a property that's in foreclosure, or even just preforeclosure?

The reality is that buying a home costs a lot of money, and most of us don't have unlimited bank accounts to fund the purchase. So if you can save yourself some money, it's always worth doing. You want to get the best possible house you can for the amount of money you have available.

Often, if you do your research carefully, you can end up with a much bigger and nicer house than you originally thought you could afford, simply because the price was so much cheaper than normal thanks to foreclosure proceedings.

When you're looking at listings, keep your eyes open for properties listed as REO Foreclosure. REO stands for "Real Estate Owned", and it basically means that the bank foreclosed on the property and they now own it. However banks are too busy making money to worry about handling a property portfolio, so they generally want to offload any foreclosure properties as fast as possible. All they're really interested in is getting their money back, not in getting the top price possible for the house.

Obviously this can be of great benefit to you, if you're the buyer of the property. Most of the time the previous owners will have been making payments for at least a year or two, and it could easily be a lot longer. This reduces the equity the bank has in the house, and reduces the amount of money the bank needs to recoup from selling the house. They can't be bothered wasting time or effort getting top dollar, so they'll often accept a price that is around the same level as their equity in the property. This means you can essentially buy the property for the amount owed to the bank, rather than for what it's really worth.

The downside is that it can take time to find foreclosure properties. You can spend the hours reading local papers or checking out local listings, or you can make the process quick and easy by signing up for an online listing service. Either way, you'll probably need to be ready to move quickly if you want to secure a really great deal, so it can be handy to have some cash handy to make the process smoother.

More info on your stop foreclosure information search:

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