“I would be interested to read about houses in trouble in Charlottesville area. Where can I find info about foreclosures, auctions, houses with late payments and so on. Are there a real estate agents specializing on this? Our agent didn’t show much interest in this kind of properties and I didn’t ask him if it is because there are not many on the market currently or he is just not strong in that area.”
First, thank you for the email, for reading my blog and for giving me a story!
Foreclosures in Charlottesville are difficult to find. There is no one place unfortunately that shows all of the foreclosures that are out there.
These are some great sites out there, but no one comprehensive source of all the foreclosures in the Charlottesville area (or any area that I know of).
For example –
Hotpads shows that there aren’t many foreclosures at all (but zoom out a bit for some perspective!)-
This is a story about area foreclosures with great comments from February.
*While this post bears some similarities to Joel’s post about foreclosures, I received the email on Tuesday morning, before I saw his story. And, foreclosures are quite the hot topic.
If you’re looking for the most accurate, up-to-date information on foreclosures in the Charlottesville area, I personally use the HooK’s site; I’ll bet they would get good traffic if they devoted a page to foreclosures and the link stayed the same every week – thehook.com/foreclosures … just an (selfish) idea. For example, here are the foreclosures from this week’s HooK.
For some perspective – realize that it’s really not that bad.
If I’d published this post when I originally wrote it, I would have beaten this post at the WSJ. 🙂
This isn’t a source for foreclosures but the Office of Housing Research at GMU keeps good records on what is happening with foreclosures.
The best way to find Pre-Foreclosures is to go to your local courthouse and search for them yourself & go knock on the owner’s door.
You’ll be looking for “Final Judgements” and properties with a “Lis Pendens” from a bank.
It seems to me the “cleanest” way to purchase a property that is in foreclosure is to purchase one on the open market once it’s bank owned. We don’t have too many of these, but when they come on, they’re usually priced for a quick sale. A few recent examples are: 2 bedroom turtle creek condo, pantops condo, property off of Cherry Ave, etc. – all went under contract very very quickly. If Seller is disclosing in the MLS that the property is a “short sale” – could be a sign the property may go into foreclosure in the near future and will probably get re-listed with an agent who is representing the bank. Staying on top of new MLS listings is key…there are numerous people looking for these “deals” and multiple offers are fairly common.
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When the property becomes bank owned, you generally pay more. There are a lot more foreclosures in Charlottesville than people realize. My group did 4 short sales last month, and found investors for 3 other foreclosures. You can’t search for them online because Charlottesville doesn’t seem to get updated that often. For example, I was talking to a representative at Countrywide yesterday and she said “we are proud to say we have no foreclosures in the Charlottesville Area”. Wrong. I personally am negotiating 3 Countrywide foreclosures in Charlottesville right now. It seems like the banks are trying to keep it quiet in Charlottesville. The best way to get the house at the cheapest price is, like Rich said, to knock on the owners door. And you can find them at the Courthouse.
There is an issue with foreclosure in the Charlottesville area. All you have to do is check the newspaper for the sales listed by the trustees. We might not be like N. VA or other states, but they are still happening. There are tons of people that are on the brink of foreclosure, 3 or 4 months behind, if the trustees were not backlogged, you would see more surfacing.
One of the reasons you are not seeing a lot of them is because PHA is doing a wonderful job helping owners in this situation. They have been able to stop the foreclosures and develop workout deals with some lenders.