How to find the price of houses sold at auction

Factual Questions
1

Egad! Someone called my bluff about being a Mr. Smartypants (they don’t know I get all my information from the Dope) and called in a favor. For various long and boring reasons (e.g., they’re considering getting in the market to buy, they have an idea of retail sales but not auctions; they don’t want to go through their agent with this, etc.), they want to find out what recent foreclosure auctions sold for—county step auctions, not, I don’t know, big county fair auctions. They have no idea where to find this information and turned to me because they’re under the impression (the fools!) that I am somewhat Internet savvy.

I immodestly told them I’d be able to help them out because I’ve wowed them by following thisflowchart and, well, like I said, I read the Dope. Aren’t we supposed to be a smart lot? Don’t I get great skills by reading every GQ thread? No? No osmartosis? Crap.

So, ego crushed, all I can find are a bajillion sites with vague promises of making me a meeelionare via foreclosures, sites that want to tell me where to go to find auctions (and make meelions), sites that want to tell me all about the process, sites that want me to know that OTHER LOCAL MOMS LOST WEIGHT and all sorts of crap.

The closest I can find is Zillo.com, but that seems to give some information on sold homes in general with no way of limiting it to auctions.

But isn’t the detail of being sold at auction part of the public record? I think this is where my search-bravado came from—if it’s in the public record, than surely some entrepreneur has collected it, collated it, entered it, and is now trying to make money off of it.

Is there? Free would be best (duh), but if I can point them to a reasonable subscription site that would make me look good too. Er, I mean help them out.

Oh, it’s rural New York, if that makes a difference.

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

Try seeing if the county government has a web site–the sales will be recorded there.

3

Best I could find was a site that let me look up by block/lot or area. It gave all sorts of stats on the houses (mostly tax related, I assume) such as footage, bedrooms, etc., tax bills and owners through time, etc. Great info on a particular house, but no sortable “recently sold at auction” filter.

4

It’s entirely possible that the county records don’t indicate whether the house sold at auction or via a conventional sale or whatever. It seems to me that the county doesn’t care how it’s sold. I think the way to find out is to contact a local real estate agent, who presumably follows the market and has statistics on this.

5

I think you’re correct.

And, I doubt that a local agent will have the ability to see what sold by auction. HOW the sale took place really isn’t that interesting after the fact to most of the people who keep the records.

6

What you are looking for is the New York equivalent of
Australian Property Monitors

They track all sale and auction results, and you can purchase information packages on the property/street/suburb you are investigating.

7

I sell commercial real estate for living. The posters indicating that transaction type (courthouse auction vs public auction vs conventional negotiated sales) are usually not not tracked are correct. It’s meaningless information for tax recordation purposes.

If you want to deeply research a bunch of sales you can develop a database for this info., and I’m not aware this sale origin data is tracked except possibly as a research exercise. Your friends may not understand that property that sells on the “courthouse steps” by the county or a private party attorney are (not always) but typically more distressed properties, or conditional tax sales where the property is only rarely actually transacted, so an apples to apples comparison re pricing for similar real estate would be quite difficult.

Beyond this most foreclosure properties are not sold on the “county steps”, but are handled by traditional auction companies working for banks. Also, a lot of the time normal real estate brokers and their agents are given a crack at bank properties in default and heading to foreclosure as they can typically obtain slightly higher prices for the better properties than auctioneers, and do not charge the bank marketing or advertising fees as auction companies do.

Unless a private party is collecting this origin of sale data the info they are looking for does not exist as a publicly available database for all properties, and even if it did it’s utility would be questionable for most real estate buyers.

Your friends have a serious misconception about how most foreclosure properties are transacted these days.

8

This. (Speaking from “Rural New York State”). The only properties that are sold at auction [here in NYS] didn’t sell by some other (more profitable) means. Why not? Because no-one wanted to buy it! There is something seriously wrong with the property if it can only be sold “at auction”. If their idea is to get something cheap at auction that’s ready to move into, they’re smoking too much MJ.