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An Antidote to Corporate Media
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Patrick
2010 Jul 1, 2:38am
I would love to help you find really comprehensive listings. So far my strategy has been to index the same real estate listings the search engines do, and present it on the property forum below. So for any address you search for, you'll see all the ads for that address that I could find, ordered by date. Free.
A lot of the foreclosure sites are indeed borderline scams, where users report that once the site has your credit card, you keep getting charged or there's fine print that lets them do other bad things to you. Their data all comes from the counties, so in theory it's public and you can just go to your local county building and figure out how to look up mortgage liens, etc. But the counties seem to delight in frustrating novices.
Please let me know if you have ideas on how I can help collect and organize this information. p@patrick.net
HousingWatcher
2010 Jul 6, 11:44am
Does your state or area have a public MLS website? A lot of places have MLS websites that buyers can access.
Done!
2010 Jul 6, 12:22pm
They all have the same listings.
When I see a house I like, I look it up on Zillow, Trulia, Zip Realty, Realtor, Google Map click the RE button, then go to the County Tax page and look up the sales history.
Then I drive by the house and get the number for the listing agent and call them, they tell me to call a buyers agent. I called them in 6 months, and they ask me if I'd like to see it today.
Just saw a chart today on my Town the ratio is 38% owner occ, 35% Rental/investor , 25% sitting empty.
Take your time.
@Tenouncetrout, I appreciate your post. How did you get that sort of chart on your town. Was it just by conincidence on a news report or did you go to some county office site to view it? I'd like to find such info on my area, as I'm sure many others on here would.
Thanks.
Folks,
I have been looking at listings over the last couple of weeks at multiple sites (primarily Ziprealty, Redfin, Sawbuck, Trulia, Zillow and then some local sites as limited as they are). What I have noticed is that there are many many discrepancies between the listings on each site. There are many homes that only appear on one site and not others. Some local listings don't appear on any of the collection sites. I was primarily interested in looking for short sales/bank owned but clearly there is almost no information on any of the collection sites. And all the free trial sites (RealtyTrac/foreclosures.com, etc..) have very bad reputations so I don't want to sign on to them. Its frustrating because I have to keep switching from site to site to find all the homes in any particular area (and even then not get the full picture).
 Is there any particular site(s) that you follow that has much more comprehensive listings of all types of homes? Are there any truly free foreclosure listing sites (not requiring signing on)? Thanks for any information.
#housing