Realty Store 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:

• Monthly membership costs $39.80 per month

• Annual membership costs $199 per year

Features:

• Access to information on one million plus homes across the US
• Includes detailed listings of:
  • bank foreclosures (REO's and Repo's)
  • HUD homes and other government property
  • pre-foreclosures
  • tax liens
  • land auctions

• Properties covered include:
  • family homes
  • starter homes
  • fixer-uppers
  • apartments
  • condos
  • mobile homes
  • vacant plots

• Teaches you what you need to know to win on the foreclosures market
• Up to date foreclosures news
• Pages of realty and foreclosure stats and charts
• Will put you in touch with an appropriate realtor in your area
• Customer support via email
• Fully secure website
• 7 day trial membership for one dollar

Editor's Verdict:

Realty Store is a highly popular and widely trusted foreclosure listings site that provides a good basic service at a very reasonable price. That said, in comparison to today's most highly polished, informative and engaging foreclosures websites it comes across as merely adequate.

In the current economic climate foreclosure investment is a pretty big deal. Across the nation, ever more home owners are finding that they can't keep up their mortgage repayments and their lenders are choosing to initiate foreclosure proceedings. This is bad new for them, but potentially very good news for you if you have a little finance to spare and the lobes for snapping up a foreclosed property at a knock-down price. A lot of foreclosures sites really push the "invest in a property, flip it and make lots of money" angle but, somewhat refreshingly, Realty Store see their primary role as helping house buyers find their dream homes.

You can search their extensive listings by state, county, city or zip and then sort the results by price, size or date listed. As well as the range and flexibility of the searching tools at your disposal, any foreclosures website stands or falls by the quality (and quantity) of the listings themselves, and in this respect Realty Store has a lot to recommend it. The listings are extensive and informative, including all the essential information you'd generally look for and a quite a bit of extra detail too when it comes to such categories as loan information, tax info and sales history. Realty Store even operate a 10 point check system on the information they hold on each property before they put it online to make sure you get the most accurate and up to date information available. This is good, because if you're to get that golden 20% - 50% off the cost of buying a new home, you'll need to jump in at just the right stage of the foreclosure process, and precisely when this perfect moment comes will be different for every sale and every property.

Realty Store's listing service has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years as competition in the foreclosure listings website stakes has heated up (a global recession will do that for you). You can now do a lot more with their listings than was previously possible such as conduct some basic searches before you even sign up and search on more flexible criteria.

When dealing with foreclosures there's no guarantee you could make money rather than lose it, so it's really important to understand all the legal niceties and nuances of what's going on. To this end, Realty Store feature a "Learning Center" which can fill you in on most of what you need to know about how foreclosures work and how to make them work for you. This is not quite as extensive or insightful of those on some of our top rated sites in this category, but should be sufficient to get you up and running. Not only do they give you the skinny on the foreclosures game in general, Realty Store also offer a good range of frequently updated charts and statistics, so you'll have an up to date understanding of the big picture as it unfolds.

If this knowledge base is insufficient, Realty Store also offer to put you in touch with a trustworthy realtor in your area with the relevant expertise in the foreclosures market. Trading in foreclosures can potentially be a very tricky game, particularly if you're working mostly online and in relative isolation from any professional expertise, so it's nice to know that someone who really does know what they're doing is available should you need them.

Other than that, you'll generally find less extra features and tools on this site than on some of its rivals. Admittedly, some such extras are merely more bells and whistles that you might use once or twice and then forget about, but others, such as breakdowns of the wildly different state laws on foreclosures or specialized calculator tools would be genuinely useful.

Like most decent foreclosure websites, Realty Story offers a 7 day trial. Some trials you'll find on such sites really are free, others claim to be free but charge you a small "administration charge" or "activation fee" which is only mentioned in the small print. Realty Store on the other hand at least call it a $1 trial membership rather than claiming it's free, which is honest at least. The cheap trial membership automatically transitions into full paying membership unless you cancel before the 7 days are up, and is continuous, renewing itself from month to month. Fortunately un subscribing via email is quicker than on most sites and relatively hassle-free. There is also an annual membership option, which bills you the whole amount immediately upon registration and lasts for a year, at which point if you want to renew you'll have to register again. The monthly price is in fact slightly cheaper than average and the annual price even better (assuming of course you'll want to use the site for the whole 12 months, which for most people seems unlikely).

Customer support is via an email form, which they promise to reply to within 24 hours during the working week. There is also a phone line you can call but they only offer this if you don't receive an email reply within the 24 period, so it's really only a last resort which, along with the lack of a live-chat option, is a shame. All in all, the customer service appears to be adequate without really making you feel valued or included in quite the same way that the best foreclosure sites do. That said, Realty Store has a good reputation as a secure and trustworthy service, both in terms of the information it provides and the care they take with your financial details. In a market where there are a few dodgy sites around who will take you money in return for not very much at all, the importance of this can't really be overstated.

There's very little wrong with Realty Store as foreclosures listings websites go. It does the job and does it competently enough, providing you with extensive foreclosures listings and decent value for money. Looked at in isolation it's a pretty good service, but in comparison to other foreclosure sites that really go the extra mile it emerges as merely a solid foreclosures site rather than an exceptional one.

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