You can now specifically search for foreclosure and distressed properties within the entire San Diego County, from this site.

Instead of searching through the whole database of available listings in San Diego County, this new tool offers you the option to narrow the search results to Short Sales, Foreclosures, Bank owned and other distressed properties.

For your convenience, I have placed a direct link to this new feature on the homepage:  just look for the FORECLOSURES search link at the bottom of the page.

Like every other tool on this website, the foreclosure search wizard is absolutely free.

New and exciting updates are in the works for this website:  in an ongoing effort to make your life easier, I have added a  new Free Value Wizard.

This is a great tool to get a ballpark value: it will show you a bird’s eye view of properties in a defined neighborhood and their respective estimated values.

The accuracy of this tool is within a 10 to 15% range, depending on the neighborhood or  area, simply because property values have fluctuated so much and so quickly over the past year. The values should however become more accurate as home prices stabilize.

For your convenience, I have placed a direct link to this new tool:  just look for the Free Value Wizard link at the bottom of the home page.

If you prefer a more accurate and personalized value estimation of your home, you are still welcome to Request a CMA Valuation, following the link placed right under the link for the Valuation Wizard.

As a side note, the whole ClayMadisen.com werbsite is also in the process of being completely remodeled to be more dynamic, offer more features as well as a more pleasant browsing experience in various browsers running on different platforms;  I will post more updates here as things progress.

HUD Sec. Shuan Donovan announced at the NAR Summit that FHA will allow the first time home buyer credit to be used for downn payment at closing.

From the Federal Reserve:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/cqdm9k

This question was posted here, by a home-buyer.

Here is my answer to her question:

We are currently in an interesting market. Just as when the market was booming, here to, in a distressed market the competition is tough. When buyers saw the market increasing at a never seen before rate they were submitting offers on properties so fast that it was difficult to get our clients offers accepted because of the number of people wanting to buy and it was a sellers market. Now the worm has turned and many buyers that were priced out of the market before are out looking for a good deal. You are not alone. If you thought this property was a good deal so did many others. The result is that a “GOOD DEAL” property will have many offers and many interested buyers. Some are investors, some are home-buyers, and some are speculators. From the position of the Seller it’s all about how much and when will it close. [...]
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