Site posts foreclosure addresses for free
ForeclosurePoint provides data on filings in 35 states
By Inman News, Friday, June 27, 2008.Bookmarking Sites
Listings at ForeclosurePoint.com include aerial maps.ForeclosurePoint, a Seattle-area data company, is offering free information about foreclosure filings, including property addresses and filing dates, to registered users.
The site offers a database of about 1.2 million properties with foreclosure filings in 35 states.
Free registration at the site allows users to search for properties by state, county, city and ZIP code area, and to specify property details such as property type (including residential, commercial, industrial and vacant land, among other categories), square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, foreclosure filing date and a range for a home-value estimate supplied by Zillow.
The Web site displays detailed information for properties listed in the search results, such as square footage and lot size, the date of foreclosure filings and whether a property has multiple foreclosure filings, and the estimated opening bid for a public auction on the property.
These public auctions are typically held on the steps of a county courthouse, and lenders end up taking back most of these properties and then listing the properties with a real estate brokerage company as real estate-owned, or REO, properties.
Many of the properties listed at the site are pre-foreclosures and may not be for sale -- also, some of the properties that have foreclosure filings may end up avoiding foreclosure.
The site also uses Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping tool to display the location of properties.
"A foreclosure filing is a public record document. Our view is that information should be accessible at no cost," said Chris Matty, chief marketing officer for ForeclosurePoint, which provides data for about 800 U.S. counties.
"We are making street addresses viewable at no cost so a greater number of people have the opportunity to see these properties," he said. "This opens the door for (this) market being available to a greater number of buyers."
Foreclosure filings data is very relevant these days, he added, "because of the sheer volume of the properties."
The site does not provide information to free registered users about the name of the borrower and the current foreclosure status of the property -- those and other additional details are available through a paid subscription service.
Another national foreclosure data company, RealtyTrac, does provide information about the foreclosure status of properties at no cost though that site does not provide property address information unless users are paid subscribers, by comparison.
Real estate professionals represent a "significant portion" of registered ForeclosurePoint users, Matty said, noting that in some market areas a sizable slice of transactions related to sales of properties that had been involved in a foreclosure process.
"If you're a Realtor -- if you're not looking at the foreclosures or the distressed segment you really do yourself a disservice," Matty said. Foreclosure data "is becoming much more mainstream" just because of the high volume in foreclosure filings, he said, adding that the site can help connect home buyers who are looking for foreclosure properties to real estate professionals.
The site partners with real estate firms to embed its foreclosure-search platform at their Web sites, and ForeclosurePoint earlier this month announced a foreclosure data partnership with several RE/MAX firms.
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Submitted by Utah Realtor on June 27, 2008 - 12:58pm.
Sites like Foreclosure.com and RealtyTrac probably aren't pleased with this...
Submitted by Teresa Boardman on June 27, 2008 - 1:38pm.
Our MLS posts them for free too and consumers will have access in a couple of weeks. For Minnesota there will be no need to use these type of sites for foreclosures
Submitted by Sean OToole on June 27, 2008 - 5:41pm.
Hmmm... Note the only difference here is whether or not the site requires a credit card, and what they offer in their "trial". Here they don't require a credit card, offer street number, but still hide other details after their free registration. Other services make the address without street number available WITHOUT registration, and offer a real free trial with COMPLETE information after registration with a credit card. This is a pretty minor variation, and I'm not sure their approach offers much advantage to anyone but nosy-neighbors as professionals will need the other details. Finally at $79.95 their service is more expensive than the others. Hardly revolutionary.
Note that foreclosure data has always been free from the county recorders office, title companies and others, it takes a bit of work to get, or a small fee to use a site that does it for you. I'm glad they at least require registration, as putting this on the web free for every nosy neighbor to see is anti-consumer, and I believe bad for everyone else involved as well, including Realtors (take note Minnesota!!!). The thing everyone should keep in mind is that at the other end of this "map icon" is a person in distress. If it were you would you want the fact you were in foreclosure broadcast for everyone to see with no effort on their part?
Personally I think the way Trulia, Yahoo, RealtyTrac, HotPads, our FLX product, and others display limited foreclosure data completely free (no registration) to consumers finds a nice balance of making information available while not crossing the line to unnecessarily exposing peoples financial problems. That said, I still think that consumers should be directed to Realtors for more information, not pitched on a monthly service - which is why we don't compete with the media sites above or our brokers/agents for consumer traffic.
Realtors should also pay careful attention to those offering foreclosure data for their website. Many of these companies are only doing it to use the broker/agent as a cheap affiliate to drive traffic to them so they can monetize the consumer. Branding is one thing, but you should demand that any provider you choose do NO marketing or upselling to your customers and that leads go only to you. We were the first site to offer this, and I believe we remain the only one.
Utah... I doubt that RealtyTrac or Foreclosure.com are too concerned. I know we are not. This is a good gimmick on their part to build a mailing list, but any real user will have to subscribe and pay to get complete data. And anyone who is going to pay is still going to select the service with the best tools and data... we are comfortable competing on that front. :-)
One thing is for sure, there has been more innovation in this space in the last 12 months then the previous 20 years. I think that is good for everyone as there are an awful lot of foreclosures right now, and its going to take everyone's best ideas to work through it.
Sean O'Toole
Founder / CEO
ForeclosureRadar.com
Submitted by Dennis Green on June 28, 2008 - 9:39am.
Sean you are right about the last 12 months. There are some very innovative companies trying to open what continues to be a very fragmented and closed marketplace. The next 12 months will see just as many innovations and some real change taking hold.
However, you are wrong about being the first and only company to to offer foreclosure listing on a Realtors website where site visitors stay on that website. ForeclosurePoint's BrokerOffice solution was the first and is the only service allowing site visitors to see foreclosure listings with complete street addresses for free. The entire experience happens within a Realtor's site, and the branding is entirely the Realtors. The service is currently available in 34 states in addition to California.
The fastest most equitable way to work through the excess of foreclosures in our current market is to open (expose) the foreclosure marketplace to everyone, then direct potential buyers to local foreclosure experts.
Dennis Green
Director of Marketing
ForeclosurePoint.com
Submitted by Brian Wilson on June 29, 2008 - 9:43am.
Dennis & Sean,
Without revealing your source if it is proprietary, do sites like yours who provide data on foreclosure porperties all get data directly from the counties or do you all acquire it through the same aggregation company?
What I am curious about is whether the differientation between your companies is in how you present the data or the data itself or both.
Submitted by Dennis Green on June 29, 2008 - 11:13pm.
Brian,
ForeclosurePoint gets it's data from multiple sources. We collect data directly from counties and from both small and large data suppliers. However, collecting this data is only the beginning of the process. The real value we provide comes from the information we gather directly from banks, title companies, trustees, and at the foreclosure auctions.
Knowing a house is in foreclosure is step one of a multi-step process. Steps 2, 3, 4... are learning about all the foreclosures on that property, the exact status of each foreclosure, each lien position, if an auction has been postponed, or if an opening bid has been dropped. Aggregation companies don't provide all this information. It has to be painstakingly collected, scrubbed and assimilated.
I think the answer to your question is both the data and presentation are different. If you are interested participating in the foreclosure market, I recommend testing all the services to find the one that provides the level of information, geographic coverage, tools, helpful content and presentation that you find the most useful.
Dennis Green
Director of Marketing
ForeclosurePoint.com
Submitted by Ralph M on June 30, 2008 - 8:34am.
Spend 50 cents and get them all for free also,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,in your local newspaper under the legals section.
www.aarsteam.com
Submitted by Sean OToole on July 1, 2008 - 1:30pm.
Brian - While the core foreclosure notice data is widely available for free, there are significant differences between the services - public records data is notoriously awful and it takes a lot of work to clean it up; most services do not track status, bids etc; and few offer decent tools for searching and managing the deluge of notices (80k+ per month just in CA).
Dennis - The only thing holding us, and others back from making full addresses available with just registration as you have chosen, is the understanding that people in foreclosure don't want their nosy neighbor knowing. Let me be more clear - these aren't typical "listings" - these are people in distress. While there is a need for services to help clear this inventory, it should be done with some discretion.
Ralph - if you value your time you'll appreciate being able to search online, rather than look through notice after notice in the newspaper. Imagine if the only way to search the MLS was to look for listings in the paper. If you think for a minute about the work involved to get from one to the other, you'll realize current foreclosure services are an incredible bargain.
Best to all,
Sean O'Toole
Founder / CEO
ForeclosureRadar.com