So, now that you have made the decision that the place to invest is in foreclosed properties, you have one more thing to do. You have to locate the appropriate foreclosure listings. There are lots of places to start your search for this kind of property, and I have 2 very general classifications: government foreclosures and reo properties.

Within the category of government foreclosures you can consider quite a many different sources. These include va foreclosures from the Department of Veterans Affairs, hud foreclosures from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Property Disposal at the General Services Administration, the Department of Treasury, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Marshals Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and also Fannie Mae.

With respect to bank owned real estate you will find many banks have their REO listings on their websites and can even find directories of the banks that do online. Otherwise you can find many REO sales via asset management companies. It is their job to help lenders dispose of such assets and many asset managers list the REO properties of the banks they work for on their own website.

A good investment possibility is homes that are currently in pre-foreclosure situations. Public notices are available at the County Clerk which can be searched by anyone and will be registered at various stages of the foreclosure process. This allows you to find properties that are on their way to foreclosure and you the owners may be willing to sell in order to avoid foreclosure. Keep in mind that in order to make this type of investment you must have a good understanding of how foreclosures work.

A step in any foreclosure is that a Notice of Sale has to be placed in the local paper. Look for trustee sales in the section where public notices are in local publications and magazines. You are at an advantage if you know about the properties before they are at this step in the proceeding. If you make a purchase at a trustee sale, be sure to do your homework, as the properties as sold "as-is, where-is."

It would also be beneficial to become familiar with the website for the county that is your target area to make use of the resources that it offers for searching for foreclosures in the area. This will be useful for you whether you are looking for pre-foreclosure listings, or foreclosure auctions on the steps of the county courthouse.

As you may notice there various sources of foreclosure listings and I recommend that you explore several sources as opposed to only using one foreclosure database. If you expand to include the listings of a few banks, asset managers and government agencies as well as the county clerk you will have a more varied range of listings to chose from. And this will give you an edge over investors competing with you for properties.