Bank Foreclosures & Preforeclosures

Foreclosure properties offer a way to acquire their homes at incredible prices, sometimes saving as much as 30% to 90% on the price of their home. For first-time buyers or those looking to profit from buying real estate and reselling it at a profit, foreclosures and preforeclosures can be purchased for a fraction of their market value. Before the Internet explosion, finding foreclosure homes meant buying expensive lists or knowing someone with inside information. Websites like those listed below maintain databases of thousands of foreclosure and preforeclosure homes and allow home buyers to search by state and zip code, zeroing in on their target area. This provides potential home buyers with details about the house or property, what the price of the house is, who to contact, and sometimes the address and a photo.

Pre-foreclosures are homes or property that are about to go into foreclosure. This is where some of the best deals can be had, before they are seen by every real estate broker and buyer on the planet. These are generally negotiated directly with the owner, who is eager to avoid the hassles of foreclosure.

What's important here? The most important criteria in selecting one of these sites are 1) Listings; do they have plenty of listings? 2) Currency; do they have the most up-to-the-minute information from banks & sellers? and 3) Contact Information; do these sites give you the information you need to contact the owner or bank? Our top recommendation in this category is again GovernmentAuctions.org.

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Reviewed: GovernmentAuctions.org       Rating: 10 of 10

This site had houses as low as $10,000 and consistently had the newest listings, the most homes in each zip code, and by far the most preforeclosures. 

Listings - More listings = good; fewer listings = bad. We counted almost 80,000 foreclosure listings, including banks and FSBO (For Sale By Owner). If you're trying to make or save money, you want the largest number of choices. This site easily plenty.

Pre-foreclosures - A hidden gem; many pre-foreclosure home listings! This is where you can really do well buying houses, before the foreclosures are listed by every real estate agent on the planet.

Contact info - Too many of the auction sites don't provide contact info; again, these guys get it right. Almost every listing has direct contact info: name address, phone number, etc.

Bonus - When we last reviewed the site, they were offering a hotel voucher worth more $300. We grabbed ours and used it. This alone paid for our membership many times over. (Guess which one of us got to use it? One of the benefits of heading the team...!)

Price: $39 Annual Membership (regularly $78)

GovernmentAuctions.org did not engage in any of the shady or questionable practices we've seen on many of the sites. No automatic re-billing, and no "hidden" charges.