In the last installment, you might recall that we chickened out on a very nice house up for auction. We did, however, find a cute little house (on Realtytrac) that recently went back to the bank. We've been to the house, but not inside yet.

I guess my question for y'all is, well ...what now? There is no contact information on Realtytrac, except the name of the bank (a big one). I found the bank's address, but no phone number, on the county property tax records. There won't be any loans involved and we'd like to keep it as simple as possible. If we do decide to make an (insanely low) offer, we would prefer to deal directly with the bank. (We aren't working with an agent at present.)

So, any wisdom? We have piles of information on the house, but having no contact name, we're not exactly sure who we should call or how we should proceed.

When you found it on realtytrac was it pre-foreclosure or foreclosure status?

If in pre-foreclosure, try contacting the homeowner and doing a short sale...

If in foreclosure, try contacting the bank (be prepared to sit on hold and get transfered around for sometimes HOURS) They can usually tell you who is managing the property and who you can contact to submit an offer.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need anything else!

Tara
tara@BadgerStateHomes.com

Thanks, Tara. It actually has been foreclosed on and belongs to the bank. Problem is, we're in Arizona, the bank is a HUGE bank, who's mailing address is in South Carolina (!) -- it feels a little bit like trying to dial up the
W H I T E H O U S E.

Any ideas on how to get connected with the right office?

You mentioned that the bank was a big one - it should have a 'headquarters' type of office somewhere in the US, the main branch of that bank overall. Try to find that on Google. Either that or look up the city that the specific bank you're dealing with is in and call information for that city, 411. Give the city name and the bank name and they'll probably have a contact number! Good luck!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mrs Stogs,

Hire a buyers' agent. The bank will most likely eat the fee.

Update: so this behemoth bank has a faxline where you can fax inquiries and they purportedly get back to youwith contact information. Problem is, they want you to fax them both "The Deed of Trust" (okay, I can get that from the county, I guess) and "The Assignment of Mortgage." Where the Sam Hill do I find that?

[Oh, and they say they reserve the right to totally ignore you, point at your fax and laugh or ball it up and play trashcan basketball with it, if they so choose. ]

You need an agent who is familiar with the process and has the contacts for REO owned properties.

Ask for the "Loss Mitigation" department. I suppose you could send a copy of the offer to the bank president's office, and hope his assistant gets it to the right place. That would be a long shot, but you never know.

Wow, I just had my first post eaten!

In a nutshell... try the
L o s s M i t i g a t i o n department.

Update: well, after much fruitless research, apparently the house sold after the auction, but before it was listed in the MLS. We're not broken hearted or anything, it was a bit too small (though very nice and over 86K less than it was it was last year). However...

[rant]what is up with these banks and their absolutely awful, unfriendly, byzantine, frustrating procedures for disseminating information to the public on homes they presumably would like to sell? After trying to get some basic contact details out of two of the big boys, being shunted from department to department and winding up in six kinds of phone-jail, I can only assume that though 'my call is important to them' their bureaucratic little corporate hearts just ain't in it. How hard would it be to post a list of the homes they're trying to unload, along with who to contact, and the pertinent details on their impossible to navigate, purposely obtuse, contentless websites?

Sheesh! [/rant off]

could it be that they're trying as hard as you are to keep their greedy little hands on it too--contacting friends & whomever so they can get their ducks in a row to purchase. that's always been my thought. kinda like when martha stewart got that call to dump her stocks, there's calls being made to buy.