Foreclosure Free Search Reviews

Editor's Star Ratings:

Foreclosure Listings:
Searching Tools:
Features:
Ease of Use / Navigation:
Ease of Joining / Registration:
Customer Support:
Value for Money:
Overall Star Rating:

Membership Costs:

• Subscription is $9.95 per week (charged monthly at $39.80 per installment)

Features:

• Access to thousands of property listings in all 50 states
• Includes pre-foreclosures and HUD foreclosures
• Listings include:
  • price
  • photo
  • location
  • map
  • number of bedrooms
  • number of bathrooms
  • square footage
  • year of construction
  • tax information
  • assessed value
  • sales history

• Updated several times a day
• Free alert emails
• Fully secure website
• Customer support by email or phone
• Free credit report
• Free 7 day trial membership

Editor's Verdict:

Any Foreclosure site that calls itself "the only foreclosure search engine", as Foreclosure Free Search does, is clearly not to be taken at face value. It's rather like Arkansas calling itself "the only state in the United States of America". This level of shameless hyperbole raises a further question - is it even really a "free foreclosure search"? Well, yes it is. Absolutely free, for seven days. Then you pay.

So it's not the only foreclosure search engine and it's not free, but for some reason there's something quite endearing about a site that trumpets grandiose, inflated and blatantly erroneous claims like this so brazenly, especially when they're so patently made-up that there can be no real intention to lead the reader astray. Call it showmanship.

This brazen quality is even more endearing when one considers that not only is Foreclosure Free Search not the only foreclosure search engine, it's not even that big a fish in the foreclosures pond. This contender is a middleweight at best and it's punching well above its weight. Which isn't to say that it doesn't have anything to offer, as the foreclosure listings themselves are actually quite good.

As with most foreclosure sites the primary searching criteria is by location, either through selecting your state and city from a list or clicking on a map. However, a lot of the best foreclosure listings site offer you more flexibility when it comes to searching options than Foreclosure Free Search do, as well as more options for narrowing down and organizing your search results. The search engine itself then, is fine but nothing special. You can see bare-bones information (price, location, date listed) without signing up, though not as much as many other sites let you see at this stage. The full listings (the ones you actually have to pay money to see) are fairly comprehensive, covering all the main areas of interest, including default amount, tax information, loan details and sales history. In most cases there are also photos of the property in question available to view.

But other than that, though, there's not much else here to shout about. The very best of its rivals offer a wide range of tools, features, finance calculators, educational guides and other bonuses to help you invest in the foreclosures market more wisely, but here there are the listings and that's pretty much it. Fortunately, the listings themselves are decent enough, so if you're a "just the facts, ma'am" kind of property investor, and don't want all the extra whistles and bells, this bare-bones approach may suit you just fine.

Admittedly, the site does offer an online demo video you can view but it's really more of a cheesy commercial than a demonstration of how the service actually works. The site also offers free property alert emails, which you don't actually have to sign up as a member to receive (although you may have to subscribe in order to take advantage of the any of the information they offer).

Whilst Foreclosure Free Search does offer some educational resources, these merely consist of a link to the information pages of Foreclosure.com, one of our more highly-rated foreclosure websites, with which this site is closely affiliated. In fact, though you access their listings through the gateway of Foreclosure Free Search, the basic listings service they offer (as well as the price) is the same as with Foreclosure.com anyway. The good news is this means you're getting your listings via one of the best and most trusted sites in the online foreclosures market, the bad news is that it renders Free Foreclosure Search itself somewhat superfluous. Knowing this and still choosing Foreclosure Free Search would be rather like booking a suite at the Ritz but then insisting on entering and leaving via the slightly grubby service entrance behind the hotel rather than through the plush lobby. Far better to go straight to Foreclosure.com and enjoy all the extra widgets and wingdings they offer, cutting out the middle man entirely.

The website also features a link to a site where you can get a free credit report, but that's not really an extra feature as it just takes you to a vaguely affiliated site you could probably have found for yourself if you were searching for a credit report online. And, as with most other free credit report links featured on the more bargain-basement foreclosure listings sites, it comes with strings attached. Accepting the offer of a free credit report signs you up for a mandatory 7 day free (there's that word again) trial of a credit monitoring scheme, which, when the seven days expire, automatically transitions into a paid membership which will cost you about fifteen bucks a month until you cancel. This is fine in and of itself and may indeed prove very useful, but it isn't what you asked for when you clicked on the free credit report tab.

Similarly, the free trial membership of the Foreclosure Free Search service automatically becomes a full - paying membership once the seven day period is done. This is standard practice amongst foreclosure listings trial memberships but means that if you sign up for the free trial, then use the service for a day or two and don't like it (or had no intention of sticking around when they start actually charging you money in the first place) you'll have to cancel your membership pretty darn quick before they have a chance to bill you. Whilst canceling is fairly simple and can be done via email at any time of the day or night, sometimes these things can take a few days to be processed, by which time you may well be out of pocket by forty bucks.

The monthly subscription fee itself is about average for foreclosure listings websites, but bear in mind that a lot of the sites that charge you about the same amount tend to offer more in the way of extras than Foreclosure Free Search do. Some of these extras will inevitably just be neat gadgets and gizmos you'll probably only use once, but others are often genuinely useful tools, and their absence here is a shame.

Ultimately, with Foreclosure Free Search you are getting the basic service of Foreclosure.com without all the perks, and via a website that feels much less polished and accessible than its smarter, more aspirational sibling. Taken on its own merits, the service you get at Foreclosure Free Search is pretty good and the price is reasonable enough, you just don't get much else besides the listings. So why pay more for less?

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