Foreclosure Web sites expand audience

By Michele Gershberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Foreclosures were once the turf of the most aggressive investors, but these days ordinary home buyers can hunt for fire-sale house prices on a wealth of Internet sites.

Large real estate sites such as PropertyShark.com and RealtyTrac.com showcase a growing number of U.S. properties in pre-foreclosure and foreclosure, a phenomenon that is becoming far more common with the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown.

They pull together thousands of listings based on public information, adding photos or aerial images of the houses and eliminating the need to sift through court documents. In some cases, they offer phone numbers of homeowners and court dates.

In March, Yahoo Real Estate opened a comprehensive site on foreclosures together with RealtyTrac, expanding the reach of such data to its nearly 500 million global users.

"The goal for you as a buyer is to purchase a property at least 20 percent below full market value, although better deals are often possible," Yahoo's site tells the uninitiated.

Perhaps the most significant change is that ordinary home buyers are making more use of these sites, less hesitant to capitalize on the financial misfortune of others.

They will find many more opportunities, as the U.S. foreclosure rate by the end of 2007 had risen nearly 80 percent from a year earlier.

"It is what it is. I'm not going to sit here and tell you otherwise," said Bill Staniford, partner at PropertyShark. "This is a debacle going down from the top of government to the mortgage brokers. There's lots of blame to go round, but the more people in this industry there are, the better off the homeowner."