I purchause at trustees sales. I do my best to purchase vacant properties. Nothing’s worse than putting your money to sleep for 8,9,10, 12 months or having an attorney do his best to slap a restraining order on your trustee’s deed. Of course all this come with the risk and the territory, I"m well aware.
So there’s basically 5 different postponments I see on FR:
1.) Unknown
2.) Original
3.) BK
4.) Mutual Agreement
5.) Trustees Discrection
6.) Operation of Law
Does anyone on here see a pattern when they purchase at trustees sales? In my opinion #1, 2 & 5 are the likely candidates for vacant properties, with #1 being the top pick in my opinion of Of course, a drive-by is the best way to tell. However, when I’m filtering through 500+ properties on any given day, I’d like to atleast get some sort of an idea of which properties I could be driving by. Obviously I don’t have the resource to drive by 500 homes every day.
Hi JackMan,
I do not think that you can accurately determine the occupancy based on the postponement reason. Keep in mind that some of these properties may have tenants in them. I have heard of investors sending a letter or postcard to the house and then using the ones that were returned undeliverable or with a forwarding address requested as a serious clue that the property may be vacant. Although mailing is expensive it is cheaper than trying to drive by all of the homes or guessing which ones are occupied.
I cannot imagine how any of the postponement reasons have anything to do with vacancy. However Mutual agreement usually means short sale, loan mod or payment agreement underway so those would not be vacant.
Missing from JackMan’s list is Beneficiary’s (Lenders) Request. That together with the ones he listed above are all that are allowed by law.
gj - while you are correct in concept re: mutual agreement, we see banks use that one a lot even when the homeowner is no longer there. The reason is that the law limits postponements due to Beneficiary’s Request to just 3 times… thus if the lender wants to postpone more than that, they tend to use Mutual Agreement - I think their reasoning is that no owner wouldn’t want more time.
I thought the 3 postponement rule didn’t exist any more. I’ll need to look. IF that’s the case, I know of numerous situations where the banks postpone on their own WITHOUT any agreement from the borrower. The borrower is long gone - but the banks often don’t want to acquire more properties, so they postpone.
I’ve seen postponements go one for years without any rhyme or reason, usually on higher end homes. Guess they would have to change their postponement reason an awful lot for that.