The Mortgage Almanac has launched its World Wide Web site for consumers, located at www.mortgagealmanac.com. For the consumer considering a home purchase, the World Wide Web on the Internet now holds most of the information needed to find the best deal. Now, a recent review by our editorial staff reveals that even auction foreclosure properties can be found on-line. TMA's site, www.mortgagealmanac.com, can certainly help homebuyers learn more about the mortgage process. Like in the magazine, our listings compare mortgage lenders' programs, services and fees. Each lender lists their branch locations with a phone number, fax and contact to call along with the company's primary lending area. Unlike the magazine, which is published quarterly, the listings and articles are updated daily, so the on-line information is up-to-the-minute. This site can help lead a buyer to a mortgage lender who can assist the homebuyer with a mortgage application. Many lenders offer a direct link to their own Web site where consumers can find features such as a pre-qualification worksheet or a mortgage calculator. This magazine's site will continue to be updated with new articles and lenders on a continual basis. Many consumers consider the purchase of a foreclosed property as their best chance to buy an affordable home and/or make a good real estate investment. The Mortgage Almanac's editorial staff has recently conducted an analysis of sites on the World Wide Web which offer foreclosure information, including listings of available properties. The most popular database search engines on the Internet, however, did not help very much in our search for foreclosed properties. When the word "foreclosures" was typed in at the Yahoo site, for example, TMA found only thirty matches. Of those, there were several sites explaining how to buy foreclosure homes, and a listing of law firm sites specializing in foreclosures. Only three or four sites claiming to actually list foreclosed properties for sale were located, and none of those sites were in the New England region. Our staff obtained similarly disappointing results from Webcrawler, Lycos and Infoseek. Failing to get results from the general search engines, TMA went directly to on-line sites of organizations that usually have many foreclosed properties for sale. Here, we found several good sources of properties. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FDIC, HUD, VA and a few individual banks all had web pages devoted to "Real Estate Owned" (REO) properties. The properties for each of these institutions have already been through the foreclosure process and are available for sale. The two best sites to view on-line listings of foreclosed properties belong to Fannie Mae and HUD. At the Fannie Mae web site: http://www.fanniemae.com, home buyers can select homes by a variety of search criteria, including by state, city, address, price range, property type or any combination. Equally important, there are many homes for sale by Fannie Mae in the New England region: Fannie Mae listings as of October 3, 1996 Connecticut...119 Massachusetts...204 New Hampshire...48 Rhode Island...53 Maine...24 Vermont...8 While many of these properties are located in urban areas, an equal number are located in suburban towns throughout New England. All are listed currently with REALTORS®. The Fannie Mae site is extremely easy to use, current and filled with single family homes all over New England. For these reasons TMA rates the Fannie Mae site highest on the priority list for home buyers. Although the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) site does not use interactive databases for its foreclosed properties, www.hud.gov/realtors.html gets high ratings because of the phenomenal deals that are available on HUD homes. HUD maintains locations throughout the country that handle foreclosures within the jurisdiction of each field office. TMA found that each field office presents its listings differently. For example, Buffalo, New York maintains comprehensive listings of properties for sale. Specifically, the Buffalo office was advertising homes for sale with only $100 (yes, that is one hundred dollars!) required for down payment and closing costs. Hartford, Connecti-cut and Manchester, New Hampshire, on the other hand, present visitors with telephone numbers to call the main office and find out about the next scheduled foreclosure auction. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) also maintains an on-line list of foreclosed properties currently available for sale. The FDIC obtains properties when it closes failed banks and is required to sell their remaining assets. The FDIC guarantees commercial banks, which tend to make more commercial loans than residential loans. As a result, the majority of the properties on the FDIC foreclosed property lists consist either of commercial, industrial or vacant land. The FDIC lists are a great source for larger real estate investments. Most of the residential properties for sale by FDIC-about 20% of total listings-were obtained when commercial borrowers who used their primary residence as collateral were foreclosed upon. Many of these single family homes, although fewer in number, appear to be higher-priced than housing found at other sites such as HUD or VA. The FDIC site consists of a set of property lists on scrolling web pages. Information is relatively current: a visit on September 25 stated that the site was up to date through August 18. An analysis of FDIC listings on-line by state yielded the following results:
FDIC Listings by State as of August 18, 1996 Connecticut...219 Massachusetts...238 New Hampshire...25 Rhode Island...8 Maine...15 Vermont...12
For the New England area the Veterans Administration (VA) and Freddie Mac sites seemed the least useful. The VA site did not list properties, only telephone numbers of regional offices to call for property lists. Our staff obtained by regular mail a large print listing of VA homes for sale in New England, and there is a mailing list for home buyers. The VA web site, however, is still in its early stages. Freddie Mac, on the other hand, has an extremely well-designed site for foreclosed home sales, but we found only five homes for sale in Connecticut as the only listings for all of New England. Finally, some lenders, such as People's Bank in Bridgeport, Connecticut, have begun listing their foreclosed properties for sale at their web sites. All of the sites reviewed maintain lists of properties for sale that have already been through the foreclosure process. We have yet to find an on-line listing service in New England that actually reviews public records of foreclosures (and lis pendens, which are notices of impending foreclosures on the land records) and puts them on-line. Home buyers could use this information to contact distressed home owners directly and buy a home before it reaches the foreclosure auction block. On the other hand, it may be to a home buyer's advantage to purchase a property after a foreclosure is complete. In many cases, home owners lose their house because their mortgages are much higher than the value of the property. As a result, it would be difficult for them to sell their home below market value because they would still owe the lender the difference between the lower sales price and the higher loan amount. Also, many homes in foreclosure can deteriorate quickly during the foreclosure process. When a lender or mortgage guarantor takes over a property, they will price the property at market value or less and sometimes either make or allow credits for repairs to be made. Because they have an incentive to sell the properties, they will do what it takes to get foreclosed homes sold. Editor's Note: Web site addresses
with foreclosure listings mentioned in this article are listed
in our Cyberspace On-line Directory on page 17 of the Fall 1996
Issue. Michael Licamele is the Editor of MortgageAlmanac.com and President of Residential Finance Network at rfnc.com. |
Home