After 4 or 5 months of searching foreclosure property listings, we found a house on sheriff’s sale. In our opinion, the house was in a prime location, the exterior was in decent shape and we loved the neighborhood. We were going to bid on that house! We could feel it…it was ours! We read it was best to find out if there were liens on the property so my husband went down to the court house to get title information. We heard that there were people who are in there all the time looking through the deed books and will do a search at a nominal fee. My husband went there hoping to pay someone to do the search for us but when they saw that he was willing to learn, they showed him how to look through the books and do the search for free. The only other due diligence that we knew about but couldn’t do was tour the inside of the house to see if there was damage to the interior of the house. We were willing to take that risk. After withdrawing the down payment from our savings (we knew we had to put 20% down on the winning bid), we decided to go for it. I must say, it was pretty exciting and nerve wrecking at the same time. We knew we would probably be bidding against seasoned investors who do this for a living. I wasn’t able to go because I was working but my husband was the soldier going into the sheriff’s sale with the wolves and hoping to come out a winner. I remember this day vividly. I was waiting at my desk in the office, hoping to receive a call from my excited husband. I received the call around 2PM that day, but he wasn’t excited. This is his account of what happened. As we thought, there were many investors at the sheriff sale bidding on the houses. There were also bank representatives there bidding too. We didn’t know that the bank actually had to buy back the house at the sheriff’s sales in order to gain possession of the property. That is the final stage of the foreclosure process for the bank. As the sheriff was going through each house my husband saw a bidding war between the investors. None of the houses were the one we wanted so he didn’t care. After about the 8th house, the sheriff said, that concludes today’s sheriff sale. My husband was puzzled and shouts “WAIT”. The sheriff looks at him and said, “What is the problem sir.” My husband said, “There is still one house left to go on sale.” The sheriff said, “No there isn’t, we’ve completed today’s sale.” My husband said, “There is suppose to be a house on ‘16 Main Street’.” The sheriff said, “That house was taken off the sheriff’s sale list today, they got an adjournment or sold the house.” We had no clue that up until the very last minute, a house could be taken off the market. We doubled checked the previous day and the morning of the sale to find out if the house was still up for auction. It was absolutely exhausting to go through that process and not know what to expect. But it was one of the best learning experiences we had thus far in real estate. And it was actually pretty funny how my husband shouted, “There’s one more to auction”, with such conviction. In any case, our search continued because we still did not have a house.