While perusing through Yahoo! Real Estate one particular property stood out. A 3/2 home on a 5-acre property in Fort Myers, FL for a steal of $100,000. The property was a preforeclosure listed by RealtyTrac.com, but a buyer would have to read the description to see that the home was in fact a Lis Pendens notice and not a typical foreclosure. What stood out front and center in this particular listing was the price, as shown in the image above. This raised a red flag for a couple of reasons. One, many preforeclosures do not have prices because technically they are not for sale. Two, the priced seemed quite low even for a distressed home.

Upon further research I found the property listed for sale on the Gulf Coast Associates Realtors Web site. According to the Web site, the property was listed on the MLS for $365,000 as a short sale. In a short sale, the price listed is usually significantly lower than the amount owed on the loan. That is at least a $265,000 difference in price between the two listings. See image below for the listing details.

The listing on Yahoo! is a little deceiving seeing as they have listed what seems to be only one mortgage amount as the price. In order to compare I checked rival foreclosure.com to see if they list the preforeclosures in a similar fashion.

The same preforeclosure property was in fact listed on Foreclosure.com. The first thing I noticed on the search results for preforeclosures in any given county was that none of the properties list a price (as opposed to RealtyTrac search results which do list prices). As mentioned previously, that is actually more of an accurate way to display the properties as to not lead to the confusion found on the Neal Road property. Once on the property details page, under “loan information” users will see specifically a 1st mortgage amount for $100,000 (refer to image below). This information is helpful because the user knows that there is at least one mortgage and the site does not list that 1st mortgage amount as the price.