Preforeclosure listings services provide an invaluable time-saving tool for every real estate investor who is looking to research the available pool of real estate preforeclosures in your area. Should you subscribe to them? Here is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) to help you make an informed decision:

What is a preforeclosure listings service?

A preforeclosure listings service is dedicated to identifying all of the homes that have gone into preforeclosure in one or more counties across a state or across the nation.

What kind of information does a preforeclosure listings service provide?

What they do generally is compile all of the relevant information about a preforeclosure case that would be used in order to assess whether or not it is a deal worth investing in.

What information about each home does a preforeclosure list contain?

Listings services may vary, but generally they all provide the following pieces of information which are of vital interest to the investor:

1. Home owners name

2. Property address

3. The mortgages (first and / or second) currently against the property

4. The originating and / or present balance of the mortgages

5. Judgments / liens against the property

6. When the preforeclosure action (known as a lis pendens or a notice of default) was initiated

7. What county the property is located in

8. What stage of the foreclosure process is the property in

9. Document record numbers so the mortgages can be referenced by the county recorder's office

10. Opening bid (also known as the "Judgment Amount") of the property

11. When the last payment was made against the house

12. Information about the house:
    1. square footage

    2. number of bedrooms

    3. number of bathrooms

    4. the year the house was built

    5. how big is the lot on which the house was built

    6. what type of residence is it: single family home, townhome, condominium

13. Property tax payment amount

14. Property tax payment status

15. Tax assessed value of the house

16. Property "parcel number" as recorded by the county

17. When the property was last sold and for how much

As is evident from the list above, real estate investing is about a lot more than just finding a deal and making an offer on it. Not every preforeclosure is a deal worth pursuing. A deal is only worth pursuing if you are able to fix it up and flip it for a healthy profit margin or if there is enough equity in the house that you could earn a healthy positive cash flow by fixing it up and renting it out.

Why should I pay to subscribe to a list when I can do the research for free?

There is the old adage: Time is money. You most certainly could go to the county recorder's office and the county court record's office and manually view all of the preforeclosure files and research them one by one for the information that you are looking for. However, government offices across the United States are only open during business hours and if you work during that time at a regular day job, your time for doing the research will be extremely limited. Depending on the volume of foreclosures in your county, you would need as few as four to as many as twenty hours per week to drive there, sit in front of the computer terminals or request to view the hard copies of the records, take notes on all of them, and then go home. And then after you do your research, don't forget that you would need to drive by the good leads to qualify them visually. When would you have time to do all of this?

This is where research comes in handy. The purpose of these listings services is to provide you with a list that will save you the time and hassle of having to go to the county recorder's office and research all of the government court records manually. The service provider makes it their business to go out and do all of the research for you. All of the research is done for you so that you can make an informed decision about which deals are worth pursuing and which ones are not, and for the deals that are worth pursuing, what type of funding you would need in order to do the deal. Most listings services are updated daily if not weekly, so you will always get up-to-date information.

How do preforeclosure listings services compile their data? Where do they get it from?

Depending on the county, they will send out teams of researchers to each county court house to conduct all of the research and compile it electronically into a database. In other counties, this data is stored electronically on government mainframe computers and the researchers will request to download this data in its raw format and then compile it in a format that is ready for you to use.

Many listings providers are now online on the Internet and thus you can subscribe to them for a flat monthly or weekly fee to receive listings by e-mail or by logging onto their website and searching for listings based on the criteria of your choosing.

Sign up for a 7-day risk-free trial with the most popular foreclosure database network on the Internet.

More info on your stop foreclosure information search:

Get Free Foreclosure Advice and Free Refinance Quotes
Get your free on-line foreclosure refinance quote and free advice from foreclosure mitigation specialist in minutes. Compare real offers from top national subprime and hard money lenders... more...

Preforeclosure Investing: A Pocket Summary
Banks don't want to have foreclosure property on their hands. What this can mean for you is a huge real estate investing opportunity: buying properties that are in preforeclosure. A preforeclosure is a property on which the bank has begun foreclosure because the owner has missed several mortgage ... more...

Preforeclosure Listings Services - Frequently Asked Questions - FAQs About Preforeclosure Listings
Preforeclosure listings services provide an invaluable time-saving tool for every real estate investor who is looking to research the available pool of real estate preforeclosures in your area. Should you subscribe to them? Here is a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) to help you make an ... more...

Why the Preforeclosure Stage is the Time to Buy
Boy there certainly is a lot of interest in investing in foreclosures. Probably spurred on by the media as well as the sheer volume of properties in distress. This article will show you why the preforeclosure stage may be the best time to buy. For those that are not clear on the difference between ... more...

Preforeclosure Short Sale Foreclosure - Making the News Again
This time it's a legal proceeding gone upset for the banks! This bank filed 14 more foreclosures only to find the rules had changed and the cases were thrown out of court...for now. This judge wanted them to be on the title as having been assigned the note. They had not been and probably wouldn't ... more...

More on preforeclosure...