Distressed Properties

The idea of house hunting for your dream house seems like so much fun…and then you start actually looking. Now maybe if you are looking for the typical suburban house it’s not so complicated. For us, the combination of good schools, not a horrible commute for the hubby, and acreage seemed like a dream and we soon realized it might just be an impossible dream. The reason? Every house I liked in Lake County was a distressed property!

What is a Distressed Property?

A distressed property can be a short sale where it is being sold below the mortgage due to avoid a foreclosure. It might also be a home already in foreclosure. Sometimes the owner of the home has passed away and the home is left to relatives as an Estate. By the time the legal proceedings allow for the sale of the house, it has been left without care and needs some TLC. These homes can be a great value with some hard work., but you must be willing to take a chance and open a can of worms because you may not know what is inside.

Our Search

When I started looking for our home, I thought it would be easy. As important as it is to use a Real Estate agent, most home buyers now a days begin their searches online through online sites like Realtor.com or Zillow. These are great tools to narrow down what you are looking for and that was where we began. Nonetheless, these sites have many errors and do not show as much information as a Realtor can find on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service). I only wanted to look in Lake County, but my husband wanted to still be in the western suburbs so we also looked at homes in DuPage County.

It didn’t take long to see a pattern in the houses I picked. I am a sucker for an old white farm house. I would find something that looked amazing and call the Realtor to pull up more details. When would see the houses in person, the first thing I noticed was they rarely looked like the pictures. Second, I soon learned when it seems too good to be true…it usual was. Finally, our biggest problem was every distressed property I loved had issues with the actual sale. Now my daughter thinks all sellers play the “nah we changed our mind” game.