How to Find and Buy a Bargain House with Little or No-Money Down

Real estate investors know how to make money buying distressed houses. Investors recognize that bargain houses offer the best way to make a return quickly.

Bargain houses also open up a way for first-time home buyers to buy with little or no savings for a down payment. If you want to reduce the amount of down payment needed to buy a house, get the seller to pay your closing costs. In a hot seller's market when more buyers compete for the same properties, you either need to increase the purchase price to cover your closing costs or find a distressed seller.

A bargain house may be in bad shape or the seller may be distressed. Home sellers who suffer from problems such as job loss or transfer, divorce, death, pending foreclosure, and lack of funds sell fast for less. Often these sellers offer incentives to the buyer, like paying the buyer's closing costs.

A distressed house may also be a "doghouse," a dump, or a fixer. Owners of fixers are not always distressed sellers, but they may still feel pressure to get rid of their problem house.

How to Find a Distressed Seller

Look for listings and advertisements with the words "make offer," "fixer," "must sell immediately," "handyman's special," "divorce," "owner transferred," and "owner help with closing costs." If you see two or three of these clues, you know you've found an anxious seller.

Discovering the seller's problem and finding a solution is the key to buying a bargain property from a seller under pressure. Perhaps the seller needs to close quickly; in this case, a buyer ready with financing in place with a lender who acts fast can make an offer with a short escrow. Prepare yourself for quick action by getting your credit and financing in order before you go home shopping.

How to Buy a Distressed House

You must understand that a property also needs to qualify for financing. Extreme fixers in poor condition don't qualify for a 100% purchase loan. However, houses needing only cosmetic upgrades easily pass a lender's inspection. If you find a great bargain fixer, make sure that the house will pass health and safety codes. Sometimes home buyers will help the seller with little changes that make a house "loanable." Minor changes like covering exposed wires with switch plate covers, which cost as little as 19 cents, and repairing broken windows can make the all the difference in passing inspection.

If you need help with your closing costs, find yourself a distressed seller under pressure to sell. Not only will you get help with funds needed to buy a home, you might also get a great purchase price and be on your way to making your future investing in real estate.

Copyright (c) 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher-All Rights Reserved.

Jeanette Fisher, author of Credit Help! Get the Credit You Need to Buy Real Estate, Doghouse to Dollhouse for Dollars, and other books teaches real estate. She loves to help first-time home buyers get into a home. For a free 30-page "Credit Tips for Mortgage Financing" report, go to http://recredithelp.com

For more information for beginning real estate investors, see http://www.doghousetodollhousefordollars.com

There is something emotionally charged about the buying and selling of New York high-end real estate. How else to explain the juggernaut of reality TV shows about high-end brokers?

After 30 years of marriage, Sharon and Michael Newman decided it was finally time to move from the Catskills to New York City.

The house, designed by the architect Eric Fisher, looms over the street like a big industrial arm.

A town house in Dallas, a midcentury modern in Rhode Island and a Tudor in Denver.

For a century, Roosevelt Island housed a grim penitentiary. It was demolished in the 1930s.

More borrowers are opting for fixed-rate loans with terms other than the standard 30 or 15 years, especially when it comes to refinancings.

Two more glass skyscrapers are added to a group of towers on the waterfront of Long Island City.

Insurance coverage for a co-op unit; when a tenant is ‘blacklisted’; a co-op is smaller than estimated.

The market for $500,000-to-$600,000 houses in Westchester has become especially active.

A shaky real estate market means more sellers are providing buyer concessions, from gift cards to help with paying property taxes.

Houses of worship are adaptable to residential and other uses as congregations dwindle.

Nearly two million Americans could benefit from mortgage relief from the nation’s biggest banks, as part of a broad government settlement to be announced on Thursday.

A cold war-era satellite relay station is for sale in California after a Silicon Valley mogul gave up on plans to turn it into a weekend home.

How can I make my front porch more appealing to buyers?

Court hearings meant to protect New York homeowners from foreclosure are hopelessly slowed by endless paperwork and requests for additional information.

The Bay Area and Silicon Valley expect the windfall from the Facebook stock offering to make their in-demand region even hotter.

A Ditmas Park co-op, Upper East Side co-op and an Upper West Side condo.

A 10-year-old house with six bedrooms in Montvale, N.J., and a renovated four-bedroom in Bronxville, N.Y.

Prices in some parts of the country are still off by as much as 25 percent from their 2007 peak.

Trinity Church is the largest landlord in Hudson Square and is part of the effort to rezone the area to residential from manufacturing.

Rising oil prices and a boom in shale exploration are leading companies to add office space in the Houston area, most notably Exxon Mobil.

Ms. de França is the president and chief executive of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, which focuses on new residential developments.

Meet the real estate broker’s interns: an ambitious group willing to do anything, earn nothing and wake up early on a Sunday to fluff the couch cushions at open houses.

Gray Burton lives in a 250-square-foot space he furnished with antiques he’s been collecting for years.

A photogenic Westchester suburb with high-profile residents is also known for its art museum and a performing arts center.

Wealthy investors are wiring millions of dollars to New York to snatch up a piece of 157 West 57th Street - what will be New York City's tallest residential building, with 90 floors overlooking Central Park.

An apartment at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, opposite Central Park, was bought anonymously through a limited liability company.

Homes in Dallas, Rhode Island and Denver.

A Ditmas Park co-op, Upper East Side co-op and an Upper West Side condo.

A 10-year-old house with six bedrooms in Montvale, N.J., and a renovated four-bedroom in Bronxville, N.Y.

Compare the cost of renting and buying equivalent homes.

For recently divorced men, a new breed of decorators offers help navigating a strange new world.

Plants that light up the winter garden can be found at Broken Arrow Nursery in Connecticut, which has long been a favorite of gardening geeks.

A sister in need drew the painter Beverly McIver back home to North Carolina, unaware that a new beginning was in store for both of them.

A jewelry designer finds striking new objects for storage.

Timothy Sakamoto and Jochen Repolust are part of the small but growing niche making mobile apps focused on specific works of architecture.

To promote an auction of 20th- and 21st-century design, the interior designer Stephen Sills has created a preview exhibition in an apartment at the Apthorp.

Fishs Eddy now sells plates acquired from the archives of the now-defunct Syracuse China Corporation, many more than 100 years old.

The designer Russell Greenberg creates custom baby rattles with ends shaped like profiles of mom and dad.