First time buyers and foreclosure properties are really not a good combination.

With that said, what happens during a bust market is that eventually the foreclosure properties add up and basically drive the market. If 30+% of all sales are liquidations they tend to drive the pricing for most of the remaining 70% of the properties that do sell.

That means that if you stick around long enough you’ll get the benefits (low price) of a liquidation sale without having to deal with a lot of unforseeable problems that those properties sometimes have.