The Data Doesn't Lie. These Sellers Need You.

[Rob Bergeron]

Most people read market data and nod their head. They file it away. They say "interesting" and move on with their day.

The people who build real wealth in real estate do something different. They read the same data and ask one question: where is the opportunity hiding in this?

Let me show you what's hiding right now.

1 in 7 home sales are falling through. That's a record for this time of year, per Redfin. Think about what that means for a seller. They accepted an offer. They mentally moved out. They told their family. They started making plans. And then the deal died — financing fell apart, buyer got cold feet, inspection became a negotiation they couldn't survive. Now they're back on the market, demoralized, and acutely aware that the traditional path has real failure risk baked into it. That seller is not the same person they were before the deal fell through. They're more flexible. More motivated. More open to a conversation they wouldn't have had six months ago.

Foreclosure filings rose 20% year over year in February. Twelfth straight month of annual increases. 38,840 properties nationwide received filings. Indiana has the worst foreclosure rate in the country — one filing for every 1,597 housing units, twice the national average. This isn't a spike. This is a sustained pressure system that has been building quietly for over a year. These aren't investors who overleveraged on a bad bet. These are regular people — landlords, homeowners, small portfolio holders — who have been grinding against rising costs, stagnant rents, and a financing environment that stopped cooperating. They don't want to lose the property. They want a way out that doesn't destroy them. A capable buyer with the right structure can be exactly that.

MBA mortgage applications dropped 10.9% last week. The largest single-week decline since September. After five consecutive weeks of gains, the traditional buyer pool just contracted sharply. That means sellers who were counting on a financed buyer to show up are now staring at a thinner market than they anticipated. Less competition for you. More urgency for them.

And here's the number that ties it all together — purchase application data is still up 12% year over year. Every single week in 2026 has posted positive year-over-year data. Demand is real. Buyers exist. The market isn't broken. What's broken is the pipeline — the traditional financing mechanism that moves buyers from interested to closed. That pipeline is clogged, unreliable, and failing deals at a record pace.

That's the gap. And the gap is where the money is made.

If you have liquidity — cash, hard money, a line you can deploy — you are operating in a market where your competition just got thinner and seller motivation just got higher. That combination doesn't come around often. When it does, the buyers who move decisively are the ones who build the portfolios other people talk about later.

If you can structure seller financing terms, you have something even more valuable than cash right now. You have a solution. A seller who has been on the market 60, 90, 120 days doesn't need a higher offer. They need a path forward that actually closes. Seller financing eliminates the bank, eliminates the appraisal risk, eliminates the underwriting timeline, and gives a motivated seller exactly what they're desperate for — certainty. You're not just making an offer. You're solving a problem nobody else could solve.

This is the art of this business. Not finding the prettiest property at the best price. Finding the seller whose situation creates alignment — where what they need and what you can offer meet in the middle in a way that works for both sides.

These sellers exist. You only find out which by putting out fishing lines and planting seeds.