Hat tip to John for sending this in!
We’ve wondered if buying at the trustee sales might get easier some day, and to have open bidding on the internet seems like a natural progression. You may have seen this at Mish’s site, but if not, the article linked here describes some of the problems folks have had when buying at the trustee sales in Florida – from the Miami Herald:
A new online foreclosure auction system started with a mission of quickly moving a chunk of foreclosed properties while opening up the bidding process to regular folks.
A little more than a month later, some of the newcomers who bought property online say they were misled by the site and ended up spending thousands of dollars on condo liens and properties laden with hefty mortgages.
Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts Harvey Ruvin said the online auction process is working as planned, and the few complaints he has received have come from people who did not take the time to understand the process.
The site has sold more than 1,500 homes in its first four weeks, with buyers hailing from all over the world. The clerk expects the number of homes sold each week to continue to rise, eventually reaching as many as 2,000 a week, a pace that will help cut into the cumbersome backlog of more than 100,000 foreclosure filings.
Those who have lost money point to the disconnect between the website’s buyer-beware disclaimers, and the county’s attempts to promote the site as simple and straightforward “just like eBay.’
Here is a link to the Miami-Dade County foreclosure site, and Palm Beach County has one too.
There have been 2,109 trustee sales completed in the last seven weeks in San Diego County. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an auction website, and were selling 500-1,000 per week?
Reading the comments on that Miami Herald article basically sums up what happens when you open up the bidding on the Internet – you get a whole bunch of people who don’t have a clue about the process. I figured the online auctions would be a huge boon to the HOAs and second lien holders – lots of inexperienced buyers bidding on worthless paper.
Let everyone bid. Some people might get screwed but if they do it’s their own fault for not doing the proper research beforehand.
You can only get burned so many times before you figure out something is hot.
Unfortunately, a lot of people in this country are too ignorant to handle any financial matter more complex than the purchase of a six-pack of beer and a pack of Marlboro. That should not interfere with the orderly and timely liquidation of assets pledged as collateral for loans. The sale of foreclosed property in Florida is substantially different than the “Trustee Sale” system in California. Once the court orders the sale, there is none of this postponement crap that happens here in San Diego. The property is sold by the Sheriff on the date of the court ordered sale.
Yes, I would LOVE to see something like that, and have been advocating for this for many years. We can only hope San Diego gets on board with fixing the “shadow inventory crisis.” 😉
This seems like a gold rush for second lien holders to foreclose on their worthless paper. The people who didn’t to their due diligence of at least researching the title will get burned. I don’t know if letting people buy 100k properties with the click of a mouse is such a great idea but what the hell do I know. It does give the Chinese a chance to gobble up something besides US treasuries.
It would be great to have an online auction for trustee sales in the phoenix area. I would be worried about fraud and false impersonation or the like.
I think it could work, but the process for registering and submitting bids would have to involve physically proving your identity and signing waivers and whatnot.
I’d use the online auction in favor of lugging my overweight butt over to the Phoenix County courthouse for the daily sales.