This is the second post in a two-part blog series on buying a foreclosure home in Northern Virginia, and how this differs from other types of home sales. You can read Part 1 here.
Buying a Foreclosure Home Vs. Buying Estate Sales and Other Types of Fixer-Uppers
In addition to having a lot of experience selling bank owned properties and short sales, my wife and I also like to buy fixer-upper homes and flip them. For instance, we’ve also bought a home from an investor who had previously bought it as a foreclosure and simply wanted to unload it instead of rehabbing and flipping it, and more recently we bought an estate sale, which is comparable to a bank owned property. These types of sales are great for making some nice profits, and again, they involve less risk than buying a foreclosure home.
As you’re considering foreclosures and other types of similar properties, keep in mind that overall, there are fewer foreclosures and short sales in the market now than there were several years ago, mainly because the market has gotten so much better in the last few years.
Foreclosure Listings on Zillow and Other Home Search Websites
Zillow and other home search sites often list a property as a foreclosure or “auction” when it is either in the pre-foreclosure stage, meaning the bank has started foreclosure proceedings against the owner, which take a while, but the owner still controls the property), or more commonly, when a bank has already foreclosed on the owner. Either way, this is a bit confusing to people interested in buying a foreclosure home and doing research online, since the property isn’t really on the market. It’s a way for Zillow and other home search sites to create extra webpages that the search engines can index, which helps them get more traffic to their website.
I hope this article has been an informative resource as you consider the pros and cons of buying a foreclosure home in Northern Virginia. Call me at 703-462-0700 or email me at DarrenRobertsonHomes@gmail.com to discuss your real estate investing goals in detail!