Finding Foreclosures
In 2004 when I started my launch into real estate investing, it didn’t take long to figure out I was ill prepared. I didn’t have the proper contracts, the proper researching tools, or the slightest idea of the process. Now I had read tons and tons of business books around real estate investing, purchased Carlton Sheets, and even interned with a local investor that was quite successful. However, it ends up that while I got to see a lot of the business up close and personal, there were some things that were held back from me and with good reason come to find out. So now that I have had my success and learned a lot of the tricks of the trade, I’m gonna give you one piece of information that will be critical to the finding of the perfect properties and at the right time in the foreclosure process.
One of the closely guarded secrets is at the start of the investing process and that’s the ability to find the right properties at the right time and jump on them before the sharks get there. While there are tons of way to get to this information, I can tell you going and picking up the home listing books at your local grocery store or restaurant aren’t gonna product consistent results.
First it’s extremely important to know of a simple term that most people overlook or have never even heard of for that matter. A term that makes people look at you funny when mentioned. A term that stands extremely strong in real estate and will capture you the money when you understand it, what it means, and where to find it. The term my friends is Lis Pendens.
Lis Pendens is a latin term which translates into "suit pending" and is the key to finding real estate in just the right phase of the process to garner the diamonds in the ruff and can save us countless hours in time and money running around on a wild goose chase. In order to demonstrate the power of these two words, let’s take a look at just how I use it.
Once I stumbled on this term and started to do some research on it, I found that the local court house had web-sites that were somewhat open record on the subject but it costed and arm and a leg to attain membership and I just thought there had to be a cheap or free way. So I continued my research to find that directly around the corner from our local court house there was a small newspaper printed and it revolved around lis pendens, lawsuits, property auctions, and so on. It was the perfect tool! What’s even more interesting was it’s printed once a week and has a price tag of .50 cents per copy. SCORE!
So now I had this wonderful resource of all the properties in the perfect phase of foreclosure that a lot of other people weren’t privied to for lack of research and knowledge. I was set to go! HA! Not even close! I opened my first copy of the paper and started to dig in and all of a sudden, another road block. I couldn’t understand a word of what was written there because according to legal notifications on properties everything is listed as coordinates that point to a plot of tract of land.
After some education, it became really easy to learn how to read but it took a lot of steps in researching lis pendens, even more to find the secret code to where that little newspaper was printed and located, and a captain crunch secret decoder ring to understand where the properties were located.
All in All this one piece of information I have just given you jump started my real estate investing career by 1000% as now i was only looking at properties that mattered and were in the right stage to purchase them.
Of course everyone being lazy online nowadays, there are some nice resources online that work just as well but you will most likely have to pay a monthly or annual subscription rate to them. Here is a link to one I really like to use that has garnered me many a VERY nice deal.
So remember folks, Lis Pendens is the key to the money. The alternative being a nice foreclosure network on the internet but try to find one that isn’t to well known and saturated. Beleive it or not, the information on each of these is quite different even for the same areas.
If your trying to get into Real Estate Investing, i sincerely wish you the best of luck and hope my guides will help you in finding the right research tools that save you tons of time and effort. It’s about being extremely efficient to win this game, so make sure you out think them, have better tools to work with, and allow your resources to help you streamline your business!
