Keep Reading For a More Analytical In Depth Review of our top 2 picks! Can you smell opportunity?

This is something of a hybrid site that spits out distressed sale listings right next to regular retail listings. What’s cool about this site is you have a list of recently sold listings a tab away from open auctions. This makes doing market research much easier.

Realtytrac is geared more towards folks looking to buy a home to live in than investors. As far as distressed property, you’re limited to bank owned property and foreclosures. The rest of the listings are standard retail deals.

They do give you the option of searching for recently sold information, which comes in handy for doing market research before putting in an offer. And, just like foreclosure.com, they offer a free 7 day trial but this one appears truly free.

One last thing about Realtytrac: since their database includes standard MLS listings you have a bigger offering than Foreclosure. If you want to see deals beyond just distressed sales this platform is a winner.

This website has been making investors rich since 1999 and is “America’s largest provider of distressed properties “. It even says so on their site!

All kidding aside, their database is a constantly growing colossus with an estimated 394,347 foreclosure listings at the time of this writing. That figure doesn’t include any of their other distressed property listings, such as pre-foreclosures or sheriff sales.

This is the 900 pound gorilla in the distressed property list business. They’ve been around the better over a decade now, and have help many an investor put money in their pockets.

Let me give you an idea of the sheer size of their listing database. As of December 2010, there were:

• 395,335 foreclosures
• 143,543 short sales
• 81,272 sheriff sales
• 338,978 bankruptcies
• 535,056 preforeclosures
• 2,446 auctions

You can search their database down to the street level. If Bob down the block is losing his house, you’re going to know about it.

What’s cool is they offer a 7 day free trial so you can acclimate to their system. What’s not so cool is the fine print; the “free” trial is actually $1. So a handful of pennies gets you full access to their lists. But hey, if one dollar can save you a few hours of work aggregating sources on your own, I’d say it’s well worth it. You can bet I work for more than $1 an hour!

After that it’ll cost you $40 a month. $40 a month for access to over 1 million listings… now, that’s hard to beat. That just might explain why their service is still the best in the business.