Foreclosure Tours Hit Grand Rapids, Michigan

I was walking on the treadmill the other night watching the news when I saw a story on a local foreclosure tour. I'd heard of them before (60 Minutes featured a piece on them recently), but didn't know that there were any in my area. If you're not familiar with them, here are the details:

• A realtor gets a group of foreclosed homes together.
• He charters a bus to take people around to see the homes on a given day.
• People pay an amount (in this case $25) for the tour.
• The realtor hopes to sell homes while the buyers hope to find great deals.

For more specifics on the one here, check out the following:

• Overview
• About the tour
• Why buy

According to the news story, the local realtor plans to keep these up for quite some time:

"My goal is to continually run these because it's obviously going to be a big dilemma here in 2008 and in 2009."

I'm thinking of going on one of these. If for no other reason, it should be a great learning experience. At best though, I could find a new home!

Comments

[Mike S]

Sounds like a good idea. I'd check it out assuming there are enough homes in the tour to make it worthwhile. Even if you don't find a home, you are likely to gain more than $25 worth of knowledge.

[Katrina W.]

Are there people starting up these "tours" in places other than michigan? Sounds liek a great deal.

[fathersez]

I agree with Mike and Katrina. THis does sound like a great idea.

Besides the reasons you have mentioned, (which could apply for lots of people), it also sounds a lot like fun.

[Seth]

I would not be too sure that foreclosure homes are the deals that they were once upon a time. I posit that back when foreclosure homes were deals the reason you could pick them up at bargain prices was that there was in inefficiency in the market. That inefficiency was the lack of information that was easily available to potential buyers and the few buyers who did a pretty good amount of research into foreclosures were able to exploit the inefficiency for profit.

In the past year, I have lived in Ann Arbor, MI and Phoenix, AZ and viewed foreclosures, new construction, and existing regular homes and have not found a foreclosure that was even close to being a deal after adding in the cost of rehab work. Generally speaking, I believe that unless you know about a bank owned/foreclosed house before it is listed on the market, you will likely be wasting your time chasing foreclosures. "Foreclosures...the next bubble."