First of all lets define first what you are looking for in Michigan when you type Michigan Foreclosure Listings in a search engine or call a bank trying to find where can you get a printout for foreclosure listings in Michigan?

You may be looking for the pre-eviction foreclosure listing in Michigan - which in case your best bet is - Registrar of Deeds office in your local county. Pre-eviction means that the homeowners are still living in the house, they have interest in title, and the bank has not gone through with the eviction process.

Michigan is a judicial foreclosure state - meaning we are looking for a painful, drawn out 11 month cycle before the homeowners are actually asked to leave the foreclosed property.

Now off course another way of looking at this would be that it gives you 11 months to play the preforeclosure game in Michigan - a well thought out marketing campaign can make your phone ring like crazy with homeowners on the other end hoping to make a deal with investors like yourself.

The other advantage of 11 month pre-eviction foreclosure process is off course your ability to whack the bank via Short Sales. Which off course if you live in a non-judicial State like Florida or Georgia where eviction is only 30 days away from the date of Sheriff Sale or the court auction.

Now, apart from the crap that is being hyped on the forums and most of the home study courses available in the market - people who do Short Sales on a regular basis know that the actual “doing” of the Short Sale has gone from 2 weeks to almost 2 months in the last 2 years.

Nothing personal in that - just that banks are overwhelmed with the number for foreclosures coming there way. Michigan is one of the densely populated States and either #1 or #2 as far as home ownership is concerned. Lots of houses means lots of foreclosures. Such is the nature of this business.

So where to get this elusive Michigan Foreclosure Listings? No matter which county you live in Michigan - you have a court house, in that court house there is a Registrar of Deeds office, in that office is the treasure chest of the all the foreclosure listings you will ever want.

Now the interesting part of the Michigan Foreclosure Listings process is how much the foreclosure listings differ from county to county. My fellow Michigan real estate investors have to excuse me if I am using tri-county examples because I live, work and play in Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties. But here is what is interesting in these counties when it comes to differences in how you can get your hands in foreclosure listings:

Wayne county does not have a listing of anything before the “Auction” or Sheriff Sale at the court house. But you can go there in the downtown Detroit area, on top of Fishbones Restaurant (Note: their food is so superior to their branch in South field - try the New Orleans gumbo when you are there next time! Whoa!).

But you can specify the foreclosure listings by month - off course it makes a lots of profitable sense to ask for listings that are close to eviction. So if you count 6 months from Sheriff Sale I would probably get the last 4 months coming close to eviction. Your chances of striking a deal much much higher.

Here is some inside gossip from one of the top REO realtors in the Southeastern Michigan - some of big banks who have a huge number of foreclosures pending eviction in the city of Detroit are actually calling homeowners and asking them to leave in exchange of $1000 - $2000 cash.

Gee, I wondered which guy in their Loss Mitigation Department listened to my Preforeclosure CD’s. :-)

Oakland county has a totally different way of dealing with their foreclosure listings - they have pre-auction listings in Excel format. Actually they are pretty tech savvy. For a huge sum of $5 per week, they will actually e-mail you the listings in a spreadsheet which is great for mail merging, printing and doing all kind of things with foreclosures.

Macomb is pretty much like Wayne - although it has been time that I actually ventured in their offices - if anybody reading this is playing there and begs to differ, write a comment at this post and I will update this.

But in short - the pre-eviction foreclosure listing is dirt cheap, you can buy it fresh from the Registrar of Deeds for less than a cent per name - Oakland is $5 for around 26 pages every week with 25-30 names on each page. Lots of foreclosures - from $20,000 second mortgages to $2,000,000 luxury homes in Bloomfield Hills Michigan every single week.

Next : REO Michigan Foreclosure Listings - Where to find them for your hometown in Michigan?