I actually don’t know how to do that, unless you are really familiar w/your area and know what’s been on the market and monitor it. But if you’re new to the area, how do people check if a place has been for sale before?
One way would be to ask a neighbor – they are usually so taken by surprise that someone is asking them about the house for sale that they’ll tell you anything.
The drawback I have found to this approach: they’ll invariably run over and tell the seller they talked to you, causing the seller to hunker down and think they are going to get full price.
Here’s an example that happened to us: we toured a house that had signs all over the interior saying “make an offer! all offers considered!”. We really liked the home, but had a few issues with the neighborhood so I went next door and talked to the neighbor. Within a day, my realtor was getting calls from the seller’s realtor asking when we were going to make an offer.
The seller’s realtor stated that someone who had toured the home a month earlier had heard we looked at the house and they had just made an offer at near asking price. Not wanting to get into a bidding war, we passed and never made an offer. Two weeks later, the seller’s realtor was calling again stating the house was still for sale. Stupid realtor – if she hadn’t invented that phony offer to entice us to bid high, we just might have bought that house.
