Do you own a Sequim or Port Angeles home that is now in foreclosure or just a month or two away from the foreclosure process?  It is a sign of the times that many good people find themselves on the verge of foreclosure or in the middle of one.  Some have suffered the loss of their full-time job.  Others have a limited pension, but with large losses in retirement funds managed by so-called professional money managers during the past two years, increasing health care costs, and financial uncertainty, continuing to make large monthly payments on a mortgage is no longer manageable.

In earlier years you might have simply sold your home and down scaled, but with the real estate recession, many homes are now upside down:  they are worth less than the balance of the mortgage.  Some have put their homes up for sale, but have not had any buyers make an offer.

What can you do if you are close to foreclosure or in foreclosure?

As a real estate attorney I did many foreclosures in Sequim and Port Angeles.  I know the process, the costs and fees associated with a foreclosure, the timelines involved, and I know what it takes to keep your house out of foreclosure.  Some of the costs and fees can be compromised, and there are statutory deadlines that cannot be compromised.

As a real estate broker I know what it takes to sell a home in this market.  I also have worked with banks on loan modifications and short sales.  To help my clients and prospective clients, I have many online articles about the foreclosure process, short sales, and marketing a home in this market.

If you are in or approaching a foreclosure on your home in Sequim or Port Angeles, and you would like to sit down with me for a free consultation on what the process involves, how much time you have, what you can do, and whether trying to sell your home makes sense, call me at 360-775-5424 for an appointment.  Do not procrastinate, because time is your enemy in this situation, and I can help only if we have enough time before the statutory Trustee’s Sale at the courthouse.

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More foreclosures are on the horizon just about everywhere in these United States.  Retirement havens Sequim and Port Angeles are no exception, although we certainly have a much smaller foreclosure market than most.  Our own foreclosure market is a function of the mortgage debacle and the recession.  Owners who find they owe more than the house is worth are making hard decisions about whether to continue to make the mortgage payments or just walk away.  But there’s another reason we will see more foreclosures.  This national recession is taking a tremendous toll on family finances.  Many are unemployed.  The self-employed entrepreneurs, who are the backbone of this great nation, are getting hit hard, and this will mean more foreclosures.   To make matters worse, national banks with mortgage loans on the Olympic Peninsula are quite uncooperative and generally unwilling to work with distressed homeowners when it comes to  what are text book cases for loan modifications and short sales.

So we certainly will see more foreclosures in 2010.  How will this effect the real estate market for buyers and sellers?  Will this present grand opportunities for buyers?  If you are a buyer, should you be scouring the market for that diamond in the rough, aka that foreclosure bargain?

Not all foreclosures are disasters like the one in this photo, but many foreclosures are in such disrepair, or have been damaged intentionally by the previous owners so much that they simply do not appeal to 98% of all buyers.  Several of our local foreclosures have had fixtures torn out, sinks ripped out, kitchen islands taken, hot tub parts removed, and yards left looking like a natural disaster occurred.

Buyers tell me the first priority is location.  What good is a great house if it is in a horrible location?  With that in mind, foreclosures do not lend themselves to the first priority.  A foreclosure cares not where it is located, what the neighborhood looks like, whether there is a mountain view, a water view, or no view at all.  A foreclosure does not care if it is next to a junk yard or 200 feet from a major highway.  You don’t get to pick the location of a foreclosure.

Foreclosures on the Olympic Peninsula are not like foreclosures in markets like Las Vegas or Phoenix, where there are so many that they have had to develop systems to organize how the banks will work with the REOs, the appraisers, new lenders, and the listing Realtors.  By comparison, the foreclosure market here is in chaos, not order.

When foreclosures are listed in Las Vegas, they are listed at sellable prices, not excessively high listing prices.  But this is not necessarily true in Sequim and Port Angeles.  Many foreclosures here are listed at prices so high, you can find much better deals in the MLS that are not foreclosures or distress sales.

Of the very few needles in the foreclosure haystack that we do get, you can bet that the property either will not make it to the Trustee’s Sale before a full time investor has already purchased it, or it will be sold within two hours of listing.  It is almost impossible to compete on that level.  First, you can’t compete in the first instance, and in the second, there’s no way to know when a foreclosure will find its way back into the MLS.  But there are some who are either on the inside (don’t get me started on that issue, because I do not have the evidence to reveal some of what I suspect may be going on in the foreclosure market behind the scenes), or they are just involved in a series of coincidences.  As a buyer, you can’t count on being lucky with a foreclosure.

Conclusion.  An increase in foreclosures in the Sequim and Port Angeles areas will not help buyers as most of them hope or think it could.  The vast majority of buyers (98%) have no interest in the foreclosures that come across their radar.  Of the few who are interested in pursuing the idea of buying a foreclosure, most of them will give up after great frustration and months of searching.  For homeowners who have their homes listed for sale in the MLS with a Realtor at a reasonable price, the homes in foreclosure are not really competition.  Those who would buy a foreclosure are almost never those who would buy a nice three bedroom, two bath home in a nice area here.  Or perhaps that should be said the other way around.  Those who are in the bell curve of buyers who want a nice three bedroom, two bath home with an attached garage in a nice area are not likely to find those parameters in a foreclosure.  And those buyers who retire here and are serious about finding their prefect retirement home often cannot find it in the regular MLS listings.  These buyers will purchase a lot in the perfect location with a mountain view or water view, and hire a custom home builder so they can live the rest of their days in a castle of their own design.  (See Sequim Custom Home Builder)

Recommendation.  I would urge you to narrow down precisely what it is you want and can afford, as well as your timeline.  Then scour the market with your Realtor’s help and find the best home for you.  Whether that is a FSBO, a regular MLS listing, a foreclosure listing, or building your own retirement home doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you live in your dream home for the rest of your days in peace.  In other words, don’t focus all your energy on finding a foreclosure.  That can turn out to be a very frustrating failure.  Instead, focus all your energy on finding that ideal home in the ideal location.  That may or may not be a foreclosure, but  with this strategy your probability of success just went up dramatically.

A great tool online for finding a home or land in the MLS, whether it is a foreclosure or not, is this online MLS search:  Search the Sequim and Port Angeles Homes and Land Listings.

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The foreclosure process around the country is chaotic at best, and trying to buy a foreclosure can be a very frustrating experience for buyers.  This two part video series completes a description of the process from default to the Trustee’s Sale and beyond.  We cut through all the nonsense, all the hype, money-making scams, and all the misinformation to get directly to the truth as it effects you, a potential buyer of a foreclosure home.  Foreclosures Part 1 should be viewed first.  This is Foreclosures Part 2 of 2.

Buyers and investors in the State of Washington may retain the services of Chuck Marunde to draft and submit offers on foreclosures.  Chuck is a Broker and Realtor, practiced real estate law for 20 years, and handled many foreclosures from beginning to end.  While Chuck prefers not to list foreclosures, he is a qualified Foreclosure Buyer’s Agent with extensive experience.

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Sequim foreclosures at deep discounts are hard to find.   I’m surprised at how many people are diligently searching for Sequim foreclosures and Port Angeles foreclosures.  There are four main foreclosure databases online for consumers.  They are more accurately called “foreclosure information sources,” but for simplicity, I’ll refer to them as “foreclosure data sources.”  Here they are with my analysis as a real estate foreclosure attorney and now real estate broker and Realtor.

Clallam County Foreclosure Data Source No. 1:
Foreclosure.com

This is the largest database in the country for foreclosures.  Unfortunately, in Clallam County it is not complete.  I subscribed to this service for almost two years myself so I could provide a service to my clients, but as I learned and as my clients have discovered, this database is incomplete.  They offer a free trial, but you have to register to get access, and that annoys me.  But there’s a bigger problem.  They do not have a contract with the Clallam County Auditor’s office to scrape the data from the county’s site.  I spoke with one of the founders of Foreclosure.com on the phone, and he was certainly nice but said that they had to focus on larger metropolitan areas, and he had no idea when, if ever, Clallam County would be included in their database.  Right now the foreclosures that show up on their site are pulled randomly and automatically with their software but it is quite unreliable.  So if you are serious about searching for foreclosures that are actually for sale, I do not recommend this site.

Clallam County Foreclosure Data Source No. 2:
RealtyTrac.com

I also tried subscribing to RealtyTrac.com for about a year, but I could repeat what I just wrote about Foreclosure.com.  I do not recommend this site for the serious buyer or investor.  There are foreclosure homes that show up for Clallam County, but again no one is actually entering these, and they do not have a contract to collect the information from the Auditor’s office, so this data is randomly pulled from various Internet sources, and many of these listings are not, I repeat not, for sale.

Clallam County Foreclosure Data Source No. 3:
USA-Foreclosure.com
(Northwest Trustee Services source)

Northwest Trustee Services certainly has a closer connection than the first two, and they hire our local appointed Trustee at the Friday morning sales.  They do the paperwork on many foreclosures and adminster the sales.  It appears they list their data with USA-Foreclosure.com.  This site includes only the foreclosures they are adminstering.  They also do not collect data from the County on all the foreclosures.  This is a good source for foreclosures as long as you realize it is not the full database.

Clallam County Foreclosure Data Source No. 4:
Clallam County Auditor
(the original  or source database)

Finally, we arrive at the original source of foreclosure data, the Clallam County Auditor’s office.  This is where all real estate documents must be filed, including the Notice of Trustee’s Sale, which shows the balance owed, by whom, the scheduled date of the Trustee’s Sale, and the Trustee or Attorney handling the foreclosure.  If you want reliable data, this is the place to go, and this includes every Foreclosure in Clallam County.  The challenge is that this is a database of real estate records that is not designed for real estate investors or buyers.  That means the searchable fields are not at all convenient for searching.  You’ll have to spend hours every week to sift through thousands of real estate recordings to find a diamond in the rough.  But let me save you a lot of time:  You can filter your search by searching only the Notice of Trustee Sales.  The results are still clumsy, but that does narrow it down a lot.

Finding a Sequim foreclosure or a Port Angeles foreclosure that is a good deal will be very hard, and when you find one, you can bet that many others have found it to, including some cash strong investors who know how to do their due diligence.  There are some who work at this 40 hours a week.  Do you have 40 hours a week to filter through 1,000 foreclosures to find one that you would be willing to buy so you can complete with other bidders?  Now if we were in Las Vegas or Phoenix or Miami, this would be a totally different scenario, but in Sequim and Port Angeles, you can see why hunting for foreclosures is such a challenge.

I’ve handled many foreclosures as a real estate attorney, and as a Realtor I’ve represented clients buying foreclosures.  If you want me to represent you, I’d be glad to.  I don’t have the 40 hours a week to search for the steal of the century, but if you get lucky and find one, I can guarantee I know how to buy it.   Some fees are negotiate, and others are not.  You can email chuckmarunde@gmail.com or call 360-775-5424 anytime.

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Buying a home in Port Angeles or Sequim right now would undoubtedly take advantage of one of the best market opportunities buyers have had in decades, but one area that creates confusion is the foreclosure market.   Buyers ask me regularly if they can get an extraordinary deal buying a foreclosure.   There are foreclosure stories galore about people picking up a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home for $105,000 in Vegas, or a 4 bedroom home on 5 acres on the top of the mountain in California somewhere for $245,000.

Port Angeles and Sequim simply don’t have a big foreclosure market to take advantage of.   Sure there are some foreclosures here, but very few, and the foreclosure records (data bases) here are in total disarray.   You can’t access the volume of information here on a foreclosure that you can in most areas of the country.   Foreclosure.com is the largest foreclosure website, and I have a monthly subscription I pay for the benefit of my clients.   Unfortunately, they do not have a signed agreement with the Clallam County Auditor’s office to bring all the real estate information into the Foreclosure.com database.   They could, but we are too small and too far out of the way to prioritize.   The same of true of Realty Trac and all the other foreclosure services.

Even if you find a foreclosure, if it is a nice home you would want to live in, it is likely to never make it to the Trustee’s Sale, because the owner will either borrow money from a friend or family member to pull it out of the foreclosure process, or they will sell it to someone they know or to an aggressive investor who spends 40 hours a week looking for that home.   The foreclosure market here is very small and the real opportunities for buyers are very limited.

There are far more opportunities with homes listed in the MLS here, which includes homes that were foreclosed and are now on the market for what may be less than the original balance.   That could mean a short sale, and that could end up being a good transaction.   But notice that these listings are simply in the MLS, like all other listings.

My recommendation is that you search the MLS for your ideal home.   If you don’t find it, you may want to consider buying a lot at the current garage sale prices and have your dream home built by a good builder.

No matter what you are looking at, may I save you time and stress (and potentially a lot of money)?   I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now, including 20 years as a real estate attorney.   I’ve seen a lot of people over the years spin their tires and waste money and time when they could just email me or pick up the phone and get simple answers without any charge at all.   There’s no downside to that and a lot of upside for you.   Anything I have learned or experience is yours for the asking. Why would I make such an offer?   Because I hope that by being generous you may consider retaining me as your buyer’s agent.

Where can you find the best MLS search?   Here.   Search the Entire Sequim MLS and the entire Port Angeles MSL.

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There are Sequim and Port Angeles homes in foreclosure.   Many are in pre-foreclosure, and for some the Trustee’s Sale Date is looming.   This is unfortunate for the owners, and that’s an understatement.   When it comes to getting the home sold in a timely way, and pocket some money, this is more difficult than most think.   Talk is cheap, so be cautious about any investor or real estate agent who talks big, because most of the talk is just that–talk.   At the end of the day, you are very likely in this market to end up simply losing the house at the sale.   All the equity you have will just go poof!

I have several clients who are cash buyers, and they have asked me to find them a good investment.   This is not easy to do.   I have more data on Sequim and Port Angeles foreclosures and more access to relevant information than probably any other agent out there, and having been a real estate attorney and now a broker, I don’t think it is unfair to say I probably have more knowledge and experience in handling foreclosures than most, but . . . it is still very difficult to find a foreclosure property that is a reasonable investment for a buyer.   Let me explain that.

There are many homes in pre-foreclosure and foreclosure, and to do the due diligence required of me to narrow down a 100+ properties, collect the ownership and financial data, look at the homes and evaluate them, do comparative market analyses, figure out what they could be sold for in this market, and work with a potential investor, all of this alone could take 60 hours a week.   In other words, working foreclosures could easily be a full time job, and as a Realtor, I have other clients, other listings, and other responsibilities.

Cash is king!   Always has been.   So, here’s the deal.   If you, or someone you know, has a home in foreclosure, or land in foreclosure, email me with the information or call me, and I will examine your property and see if I can sell it for you.   Of course, that could be to one of my current clients or it could be by listing it and promoting it to other potential buyers.   You won’t find anyone more diligent and caring in this process than me.   I mean that.

May I make a suggestion?   Do NOT procrastinate.   A Trustee’s Sale Date has a way of creeping up on you like a ghost in the night.   You do not have time to fool around, to experiment with various approaches that might sell your home, to try to become an expert in marketing and real estate by being your own FSBO, or by letting an inexperienced real estate agent burn up the next few months dinging around while you lose your home.

May I be bold here?   I am being blunt, because many who are in foreclosure are simply out of time.   Real estate agents are a bit like attorneys.   Ask an attorney if he or she can handle a particular legal matter, and their answer is always, “Yes,” even if they have never touched the subject.   Hey, everyone has to start somewhere.   There’s a first time for everything, right?   It’s just that if you are in foreclosure, you don’t have time to let others learn in the school of hard knocks at your expense.   There’s too much at stake for you.

You know how to reach me.

Sincerely, Chuck Marunde, J.D. (Realtor and Retired Real Estate Attorney
chuckmarunde@gmail.com
360-775-5424

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