HotPads.com ... a Different Way to Keep Tabs on the Foreclosure Market

Have you ever sat in a diner or other restaurant and overheard someone eat an entire meal while talking on the phone? That happened to me and my husband this morning. He was on the phone when we arrived, he was one the phone when his meal arrived, he was on the phone throughout the meal, and he was on the phone when he went into the men’s room afterwards.

We didn’t really want to eavesdrop, but he was pretty loud, and we couldn’t really avoid overhearing him. What was interesting was the topic of conversation, which revolved around bank-owned homes, and foreclosure investing in general. Living in Nevada, which is a real hot spot in the foreclosure market, we have a lot to choose from. Reno’s nowhere near as bad as the Vegas area, but even here in our much smaller town we’ve got something like 2600 homes to choose from.

In any event, that reminded me about this web site I came across last week, called Hot Pads. It’s a multi-purpose site, showing both sale and rental listings, but it also has a pretty neat foreclosure listing feature. What I liked about it was that it’s a visual listing - start with a country-wide map and point and click your way down to individual streets. It links to RealtyTrac, so if you want more information than what you get on the site you’ll have to pay for a membership, but it can be a useful tool to see what’s going on in your neighborhood, and to see where the highest concentrations of properties are located.

And Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there! In a true sign of our wired times, I got a pre-Mother’s Day text message from my kid … telling me that he forgot to send a card