In my area no web site can keep up with the sales of bank owned properties. I have had to stand outside and wait for other agents and their clients to tour the house. About 35% of the listings my clients want to see are off the market, taking multiple offers or only taking back up offers on a property.

A new trend in my area is that agents are stating in the description that they are waiting for approval of a satisfactory offer or only taking backup offers and this helps improve my productivity in the market and keep my clients happy by not wasting time.

Thu May 8 2008, 19:03

Most foreclosure website are not updated regularily . The info is old or only partially correct. Most REO will appear in the MLS so a realtor is your most accurate and upto date sourse.

Thu May 8 2008, 18:12

While Trulia is a fantastic website that we really like, you will find that a lot of the properties on Trulia are not up to date as far as their availability. This is because Trulia is "fed" listings from agent and broker websites, which have no regulation as far as when they remove older listings. The only truly reliable source for available properties is your local MLS. The MLS we belong to actually fines agents if they do not update a property's status within a certain amount of days after the status changes. But An agent can leave a property up on their website as long as they want, and if that website feeds to Trulia it will look like it is available.

Thu May 8 2008, 17:13

Addendum: I would find it a more forthright representation if Trulia provided a disclosure next to the foreclosure button, and on each of the foreclosure properties that these may or may not be available for sale. The fact that so many people write, call, and email with the same misunderstanding which you just voiced indicates the needs for clarity and disclosure.

Thu May 8 2008, 16:41

These properties appear on Trulia because the data on foreclosures is simply a notice of a legal filing, not an offer for the sale of the property. Trulia gets a data feed from Realty Trac, which collects data from pubic sources on legal actions filed on foreclosures. Because "foreclosure" is term that ranks high with the search engines, Trulia derives much benefit from this; high rankings, more page hits, etc. Trulia made a business decision that the value of the page hits was worth it to add this data to the list of "Find Homes".....even though they are not "for sale." The inclusion of this info causes confusion for many prospective buyers. You are not the first buyer to ask their Realtor to show them a home they found on Trulis as a foreclosure that is not for sale. I have previously expressed my disappointment in Trulia’s decision on this matter.

Thu May 8 2008, 16:38