Re: CONFUSED, WHAT TO DO NEXT!!! - Posted by Carmen
Posted by Carmen on May 09, 1999 at 17:54:06:
Bank owned, corporate owned, and foreclosed are used interchangeably by some realtors. They all pretty much mean the same thing - usually beat up! In Florida a while back, we were told we could not use the word “foreclosure” any more in ads - although people still do, so I don’t know if anything came of this.
To answer your questions, you can put an offer in directly through the listing agent. Unless you know of a good realtor/agent that you want to work with, there is an advantage to going direct - the listing agent will “talk up” your offer, because they then get the full commission, instead of only half.
As far as FMV, you can ask any real estate agent to run a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) for you on the property. Many will do this for free. These can be somewhat subjective, but if you ask them to print out a list of all the properties sold in the neighborhood for the past year, you’ll get a good feel. To do a “real” CMA, you would have to pick out all the foreclosures, bank owned, handyman, etc. to get to a “true” fair market value, which requires some time, and which your agent would be able to do. But usually, if you see 7 homes sold for $75K, then 2 sold for $40K, you can pretty much tell that the going rate is about $75K, and the less expensive homes must have had extenuating circumstances. Always make sure you are comparing apples to apples when it comes to size (square footage), number of bedrooms/baths and construction (Concrete Block or CBS versus Frame, etc.)
You can also check the tax rolls, and do the same thing. There are also some sites on the web where you can do a similar search, which have been mentioned here before, such as http://ww.realestate.yahoo.com/realestate/homevalues/address.html and http://www.experian.com/home.html
Good luck!
Carmen