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The New York Times has an article today about the dangers of buying a home online sight unseen. The online marketplaces seem like a great way to buy small items, but the machinations  of the real estate market are there for a reason. Real Estate agents have to follow a code of ethics or risk their license. Home inspectors can tell you about weaknesses of the home before a purchase is consummated.

On eBay, the biggest online marketplace, and dozens of other Web sites with names like Bid4Assets.com and Realestatesupermarket.com, sales involving tens of thousands of dollars can occur entirely online. EBay, for example, may have more than 1,800 residential properties listed on any given day–from multimillion-dollar vacation houses in Florida to thousand-dollar fixer-uppers in the rural Midwest.
But now, with plenty of buyers eager to get in on the real estate boom, such online sites have become perfect places for unscrupulous sellers who have bought dilapidated houses at, say, foreclosure auctions, to resell, or flip, them quickly for inflated prices. Many of the deals sound too good to be true. But the gullible are lured by nice photos and a belief that online transactions on big Web sites are generally safe. via CNET News.com.

I guess there are always people on both sides of a transaction that will pull tricks or take risks for an extra special deal. However, I am amazed that someone would buy real estate sight unseen across the internet.

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