Rising interest rates + cooling Real Estate market = hot foreclosre market!

One of the ingredients of a hot foreclosure market is rising interest rates. Well for a while, we had that and now they've stabilized a bit.

So we'll either see an increased sales of current bloating real estate inventory or we might see a small dip in the foreclosure market.

In either case, this is short lived and subject to radical fluctuation depending on the oil market, job market and other economic factors.

I read a rather interesting article by Ruth Simon of Wall Street Journal where she observes:

"Economists expect delinquencies and foreclosures to rise from today’s historically low levels. Nationwide, the percentage of home loans on which payments were past due fell to 4.41 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in the first quarter, after rising to 4.70 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. A variety of websites have sprung up to cater to home buyers and investors looking to purchase properties in or nearing foreclosure. They include RealtyTrac.com, which ranked seventh among real estate websites in terms of unique visitors in May, according to comScore Media Metrix, a unit of comScore Networks Inc. Foreclosure.com, another popular offering, not only runs its own website, but also says it supplies data to more than 200 other websites."

So interesting is the observation by David Benham:

“We run into a lot of problems with foreclosure websites because a lot of the houses can’t be sold” because various legal requirements haven’t been met or the lender hasn’t readied the property for sale, says David Benham, owner of Benham Real Estate Group in Charlotte, N.C., which sells foreclosed homes on behalf of lenders..."

Yes, you need to be very careful when investing and as you might recall in my Step By Step Guide to Finding a Foreclosure I discussed the importance of research and asking questions from the homeonwer and/or his broker.

And using paid foreclosure listing services does in fact speed up your research. But errors do occur. So always do your due diligence.

Good luck and happy investing.

Visit Home Foreclosure Investing Blog to read Experts discuss Investing Strategies and tips guanateed to improve ones forclosure buying skills.