[quote=CricketOnTheHearth]
Temeculaguy, ForeclosureRadar.com appears to be a kind of tracking site for realtors, sort of a Zillow for foreclosures.
[/quote]
Foreclosure radar is not a tool for realtors, it is a data gathering subscription service, like realty trac and foreclosure dot com. zillow is another place not used by pros as biblical info. All of these sites have their place and can be helpful, but they are not monitoring the listings by hand, they import county records into their database, but they don’t always remove listings. If someone sells, finds money and catches up on their payments, gets a loan mod, or whatever other reason that it is removed from the foreclosure pipeline, the data is often orphaned and left on the site. Basing an analysis on imperfect data, often leads to imperfect analysis. It’s not just a few, I’ll guess at least half.
There are many threads about this problem with the subscription sites. In some cases, people have posted properties and lists of properties and different posters have looked into the property tax status, the records themselves and in some cases have driven by. On one thread, most of the listings posted were invalid. Another thing we found that if someone lets a rental go into a foreclosure, it shows up on the sites as being at their primary home, because their mail goes there. I’m not saying they are doing this on purpose, they are handling an incredible amout of data from thousands of different governemnt recorder’s offices with different parameters and entry methods. Those sites are meant to offer leads but not neccesarily stats. I can attest to their ability to get you leads on potential foreclosures you may want to buy, I’m currently living in one that I originally discovered on one of those sites. But the story behind the story is that when I used the raw leads from foreclosure sites, more often than not it was a dead end, it actually worked on about my 8th try, the others that I liked never went into foreclosure and that was before moratoriums and bailouts. For fun when we were talking about it a few months ago on a thread about shadow inventory, I ran my current neigborhood and houses that appeared on the sites had new owners already, I met them, I watched the house sell and the old people leave or I researched the tax records and saw the person become current on their taxes, which contradicts someone milking the foreclosure process.
Since this post has exceeded 200 words without a sports, alcohol or porn reference and that is a requirement in my contract, here it is. It is alot like those spam e-mails you get where they claim “hundreds of hot women in your area want to have sex with you,” which is exactly what I want to hear. If you click on the link, enter your zip code, there are hundreds, but if you pay to join the site, those profiles haven’t been active for years, some aren’t real, you end up with only a handful of choices that even when drunk, none of them look that good (not that I’ve ever done that, the reference is for illustrative purposes only).
I don’t think the foreclosure sites are pulling the same bait and switch, but I’m not so sure they spend a lot of effort cleaning up the listings and it doesn’t benefit them to do so, so that is why you shouldn’t base a prognostication on that data, just use it as a starting point for more research. Just like I’m not convinced that hundreds of hot women want to sleep with me, well actually I am, strike that.
