Buying Foreclosures, REOs. Short Sales, FSBO, MLS and More

I am new to investing and I am looking to wholesale. I am looking at a few homes that are shortsales and don't require much rehabbing. Do I make aggressive offers like I would with a real rehab house? The offers seem so low.

I need to know how to place a property under contract and the difference between making and offer

Some of you may or may not know this, but Zillow.com is now showing something they call pre-foreclosures. I thought it might be a good idea to send post-cards to these property owners, since they represent a fairly good targeted market. Does anyone have any thoughts on this or any suggestions as to what the post-cards should state?

Option #3 Listed Properties:
1. Go to www.zillow.com to search by county, city or zip code for properties that match your buyer’s criteria that either just hit the market in the past 1 day OR that have just had price reductions in the past 30 days.
2. Additionally you should REGISTER with Zillow in the upper right hand corner and then save both of those searches and have them sent to you on a daily basis. This is the only way to get properties delivered to your email either the first day they hit the market or the first day they had a price reduction which is SWEEET!!!! Between those two emails coming in your going to do a great job covering the listed properties and there won’t be much slipping through the cracks that may take the discount we are looking for.

We teach our students to make cash offers on properties. The reason for making a cash offer with only an inspection contingency is simple. We want our offers to be clean and simple. A cash offer with only one contingency in the body of the contract is more appealing to a potential seller than an offer contingent upon a loan and many other things. Clean and simple offers are always more appealing to sellers. In an environment where we have competing offers making our offer as appealing as possible is necessary.

Thank you so much for all the Wonderful Information everyone so generously gives here.

I am working with Assigning Lease Options.

I am wondering what forms are used with the Seller.
What forms are used with the Buyer?

Does the Price of the Home get increased to cover the assignment fee?

If the Buyer, say, has $10k for deposit and my fee is $5K, should the other $5k go to the Seller? or should I let the Mortgage Broker put this on the Contract?

Thank you so much and Many Blessings!

Here is an article I found interesting. It talks about how in most areas the foreclosures fillings are falling. The hard hit areas are still leading the way with foreclosures and in the larger cities in Florida forclosures rates are on the rise. It also talks about a shift in banks trying to do short sales instead of foreclosing.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/25/real_estate/foreclosures-cities/index.ht...

Just thought I would get this out there in case you wanted to dial your rehab costs a little more.

In this market finding the right agent can be difficult, and when you do find one that is willing to work they do not screen the properties and send you a bunch of junk.

I have found that in a competitive market, getting the deals right after they have had price reductions emailed to you via www.zillow.com has been very beneficial. All you have to do is:

1. Go to www.zillow.com and click on "sign in" in the upper right
2. Go through registration process
3. Set up search with price reduction in the keyword search
4. hit save this search

This will send you an email every day of the properties that just had price reductions that day without an agent.

Hope this helps,

D

My previous career was as a computer programmer writing web applications. As part of my early engagement in REI I wrote a tool for pulling in foreclosure information from Hennepin County, MN. I've always had plans to pull the data from the other counties in our area that post foreclosure records online... just haven't gotten to it yet. (I have to write custom code for each county...)

In any case, I've amassed well over 6000 foreclosure records.

Minnesota has a 6-month redemption period, so I've got property records with redemption end dates from 10/28/2011 thru 4/23/2013. So not only do I know what's gone to sheriff sale from 3 days ago back about a year in Hennepin County, but I also know the redemption expiration date, who won the auction and the winning bid amount.