5 ways sellers can compete with foreclosures

By Scott Van Voorhis of Bankrate.com

Risky foreclosures could help savvy sellers

The cloud over foreclosures comes with a silver lining for homeowners who are seeking an edge when they sell real estate in a strong buyers market.

The good news for sellers is that foreclosures look risky again. Savvy sellers - or those who have equity and are current on their house payments - could turn the tables and use the robo-signing follies to their advantage, experts say.

"I am not seeing buyers afraid (yet) to buy a foreclosure," says Elizabeth Weintraub, a real-estate broker in Sacramento, Calif. "They should be."

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4 Signals It Might be Time to Buy (vs. Rent) Your Home

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

To rent or to buy: what used to be a given - that you would buy a home as soon as you could afford to - has become an agonizing conundrum for many a would-be homebuyer, in the face of the housing market's big bust and super-slow recovery. Low prices seem to create a wide-open window of opportunity, but they also create the concern that prices will keep falling after closing. And that Catch-22 has hundreds of thousands of buyers-to-be stuck on the fence.

Fortunately, there are handful of life, mortgage and local market signals which indicate that the time *might* be right to hop - scratch that - leap off the fence and into homeownership:

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