If you want to buy your own home, there's no doubt that it can be expensive. But there are ways to buy yourself a property at well below market cost. How? By buying a seized property.

Every year, thousands of homes end up in foreclosure. Usually this happens because the owner has failed to make their mortgage payments to the lender. So the lender seizes the property and sells it to try and regain some of its losses. Banks, private and government institutions all seize properties because of unpaid bills.

For the financial institutions, holding properties is a waste of their time and resources. A contstant stream of properties get seized, and it takes an enormouse amount of money to keep all those properties maintained, let alone market them for sale. So instead of going to all that trouble, the properties are sold at public seized property auctions.

The good news for you, as a potential homebuyer, is that you can pick up these seized properties at auction for bargain prices. It doesn't even matter what sort of property you're looking for. All you have to do is keep watching the auction listings, and you'll find family homes, multi-unit houses, apartments, townhouses, mobile homes, commercial properties, timeshares and rental properties.

It's always a good idea to be familiar with the prices of properties in the area you want to buy, so that you'll immediately recognise a bargain when you see one. However a lot of the auction listings include information about the assessed value and also the current market value of the seized property, which will help you decided if it's a good buy.

Financing the purchase of a seized property works in much the same way as it does for a standard purcahse. Make sure you do your research first, and make it clear you're looking at seized properties, so that you already have a pre-approval before you bid on any properties. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you may even be able to property zero-down, so you don't need to have a big deposit available.

Of course, buying houses this cheap can be a great idea if you're lokoing to build some wealth. Why not buy a house well below market value, then resell it again and pocket the difference? This requires you to do your research thoroughly, so you can pick properties that are huge bargains and also likely to sell again easily on the normal real estate market. But if you do it right, it can be a great way to make money.

Buying seized real estate requires some research, but it can be a great way to buy your home at a bargain basement price.