Sheriff's Sale - Pros/Cons - Things to look for/watch out for?

[Jeremy Horton]

Quick background - I've got my feet off the ground with a few SFH/MFH rentals - stabilized for the most part but have good cash reserves. I'll finally have an office set up in my new house so I'll be able to better organize and expand. Starting to come across needing more/better deals. There's a few avenues for this - one being Sheriff's Sales.

I have yet to go to one - but I see some decent properties pop up. 

So they are all (1) cash sales - I can just get a cashier's check or something from a HML and use that if I happen to buy a property from what I understand.

Other hurdle - (2) title. So the title is not guaranteed from what I understand - so I would need some sort of title insurance. I could get with a title company and get insurance for the properties I intend to make offers on

(3) Condition of property - obviously these are "As-Is" sales - so your offer price needs to reflect that the property may have some MAJOR issues. 

I think the idea is a numbers game - makes lots of low/fair offers (ie: say no a lot) until you get a winner. 

For those of you that use Sheriff's sales as a leads what do you look out for? Any tips/tricks you use? How do you personally like to come up with your max offer? 

[Sergey A. Petrov]

You don’t get title insurance on a sheriff’s sale. You buy it as is subject to any and all senior lien holders. You do want to pay a title company to run a title report for you so you can see what issues exist before you go bidding your cash away. And yes these are as is