Online foreclosure listing services are an invaluable resource for every foreclosure investor, and may well be the lifeblood that feeds the foreclosure pipeline with new leads on a daily basis. Foreclosure research that would otherwise take several hours or days of manual effort can be condensed into a fraction of the time, if you leverage an online foreclosure listing service.

Without an online foreclosure listing service, real estate investors would need to physically drive to:

• the county sheriff's office to find the notices of default, the lis pendens notices, or the list of properties scheduled for public auction
• to the county recorder's office to look up real estate transfer and lien records,
• to the county tax assessor's office to look at property tax records and to obtain the property's tax assessed value,
• and to the county courthouse to look up the actual lis pendens court case (in a judicial state)

If you haven't guessed, this is a very time-consuming process that requires a lot of manual research, and travel, not to mention that you would need to either pay to photocopy / print the information you find, or to take notes by hand, depending on whether this information is stored in a computer system or not. You are also limited to business hours, typically from 8am to 4pm.

All these can pose a problem for the part-time foreclosure investor who is maintaining a day job while trying to do deals on the side. When would you have time to go to the county government offices in order to do the research properly? During your lunch break? Or just before or just after work?

When I first started doing real estate investing, I used to do exactly that! My work would start at 9am but the county recorder's office opened at 8am, so I would drive to the recorder's office and be there at 7:55am to do the research... But the problem is that I had to be at work at 9am, so I ran the risk of running late for work... and then if I were to lose my day job, I sure couldn't "fall back on" real estate investing, so I was a relative newbie at the time.

So after about a week of this (I even tried leaving early from work to head over to the recorder's office, or even going during lunch, but you really don't have much time. One hour is not enough time to do manual research. You have to drive to the offices and drive back. That takes away time from the research.

Doing manual research is extremely inefficient. Now don't get me wrong! I think every newbie real estate investor ought to learn to do the research manually when they first start out. This way they can learn the basic concepts of how the foreclosure life-cycle works, how to determine what information to look for, and how to get an idea of good vs. bad deals. But this should only be for learning. If you truly want to succeed in the foreclosure investing business, you need to be able to process all of the leads that come through. What if in your county there are 200 properties in foreclosure at any given moment. There is no way you can manually research 200 properties in a timely manner.

Even if you are doing the business full-time, it would take you at least (let's say you're really fast) 10 minutes to research one deal, and there are 200 leads you need to get through. That's a little bit over 30 hours of research. And those 30 hours can only be done during the business day. So when are you going to go driving by houses and knocking on homeowners doors? Driving from house to house itself can take up several hours per day.

This is where online foreclosure listing services come into play. What is an online foreclosure listing service and what does it do?

Essentially, an online foreclosure listing service provides the following services:

• A team of researchers will go to the county offices and conduct research on every real estate foreclosure in the county. This includes the property transfer history, mortgage and judgment lien history of the homeowners, the property tax amounts and payment status, the assessed value, the foreclosure initiation and auction dates, the minimum bid amounts, and the appraised value of the property.
• In some counties across the country, much of the data is already made available in an online format, so the researchers would be able to leverage this to compile their research.
• The foreclosure listing service will compile all of this information and make it available to you either online or through e-mail or even through hard copy if desired.

In the case of online availability of data, you would simply subscribe to the online foreclosure listing service website and you would be granted 24-hour unlimited access to search through millions of foreclosures nationwide. The data is updated daily.