Pre-Foreclosure Listings Are Not For Sale

Zillow, a third party real estate site, has a search feature called Pre-Foreclosure listings. These listings are causing a great deal of frustration, confusion, and disappointment for both home buyers and real estate agents.

When a home buyer goes to Zillow’s home page search portal,
they can click on the blue Potential Listings choice and in particular the Pre-Foreclosure option.

The problem is the majority of these homes are not actually for sale and may never be for sale. Most Pre-Foreclosure homes are just properties where the lender has initiated foreclosure proceedings because the owners were behind in their mortgage payments. Some of these listings are foreclosed homes, but this doesn’t mean the home is for sale. If they were for sale, it would be a long time before they went on the market as the foreclosure process in Massachusetts typically takes over a year.

The fact is the owners of these homes often aren’t even aware their home is being featured as one of Zillow’s Pre-Foreclosure listings.

Once an official notice from a lender has been served to a homeowner, Zillow pulls the public record, posts a Google street view image of the home, the address, and some details about the property. The homeowner is not allowed to opt out of having their home publicly listed.

Zillow has published disclaimers on their site saying: “Be aware that a home listed under the pre-foreclosure category is a home that is not necessarily for sale.”

Many home buyers assume since the Pre-Foreclosure homes are listed alongside traditional listings pulled from MLS that they must be for sale and available to see when neither is the case.

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