BiggerPockets

Florida Pre Foreclosure Investor Information

There is only one free source necessary to locate pre foreclosures in Florida. This single source will allow you to locate pre foreclosure property before it is posted on commercial sites and can lead to you putting more profit in your pocket.

You have to be the first to know when the pre foreclosure process begins. By being first and locating the owners before everyone else on the planet, you will definitely have the advantage. To gain this advantage you will need your best friend to tell you.

The best friends to a pre foreclosure investor are Florida is the official county records. They are easy to find, nearly all of the counties in Florida have a homepage for the Clerk of Circuit Courts. One of the obligations and requirements of this office is to maintain and enter recorded documents into the official county records. I believe, at the current time, of the 67 counties in Florida there are only 5 which do not have a Clerk of Courts website.

From the Clerk's homepage you can locate the link for the official county records. Once located, it is easy enough to enter a query by document type, "Lis Pendens". This document is one of the earliest recorded documents in a foreclosure action and is viewable online. The down side is that the Lis Pendens is also a leading document in all civil cases so there will be some filed for quiet title actions and other civil suits but the vast majority will be foreclosure of mortgage cases.

This viewable document will contain the names of Plaintiff's (those who are foreclosing) and the Defendant's (those parties of interest and owners who are being foreclosed on). You will also find the legal description for the property and the attorney for Plaintiff's contact information.

Once you have got that written down, it's over to the Property Appraisers records. Every County except for Taylor, I believe, has a Property Appraisers site. Run a query of the land records by the Plaintiffs named on the Lis Pendens. This will return the property data card so you can retrieve owner contact information, property features, zoning, assessed value and aerials in most counties via GIS, most counties also have a sales data search to locate comp properties.

Note: Date restrict your query of the official records when seeking your pre foreclosure Lis Pendens to the past 10 days. Otherwise, more documents will be returned than you can reasonably look at.

Note: If you find that there are banks or lending institutes named as defendants on the Lis Pendens move on to another property. In all likelihood, if one of the named defendants is a bank or lender, there is more than one mortgage on the property and the owner usually has little or no equity. Of course, you could try to work a short sale with the owner and the bank-you will have contact information for both, attorney for Plaintiff and property owner.

Note: To save time and energy, you could run a query of the official records by those named defendants found on the Lis Pendens to ascertain additional information in regards to mortgages, liens and judgments filed against them.

The official county records are a pre foreclosure investor's best friend.

Comments