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Foreclosure filings are public information, free for anyone to see if you know where to find them.

But the data can be time-consuming and tricky to gather from government offices. So a plethora of services have emerged to sell data to investors.

Among them are Foreclosure.com, ForeclosureS.com, Default Research and RealtyTrac — which is probably the best-known because the company regularly sends foreclosure reports to the news media. (You may have noticed that many foreclosure-related stories in this paper and others cite RealtyTrac figures.)

The services charge monthly fees — usually about $40 to $70 — to view foreclosure data and related information. But one newer service, ForeclosurePoint.com is offering the basic address data for free.

Chris Matty, ForeclosurePoint's chief marketing officer, said the company's goal is to "democratize the foreclosure market."

"Our view is that's a public-record data that should be available free of cost," Matty said.

The company is based in Bellevue, Wash., "in the shadow of Microsoft," Matty said. (Microsoft's headquarters is near Bellevue, but technically in Redmond.)

ForeclosurePoint will charge about $80 per month for "premium" services, which will include more detailed information about individual properties as they advance through the foreclosure process, Matty said. He said the company is still working out the details of the premium services.

Foreclosure processes vary from state to state, and there may be several documents filed as lenders initiate foreclosures, take properties to auction and repossess them.

Representatives from a couple of the other foreclosure data sites dismissed ForeclosurePoint's free access to addresses as a potential threat to their business model.

Stephen Chip, spokesman for Florida-based Foreclosure.com, said addresses alone, without contacts or other information, are probably not useful to investors.

"The real juice and important stuff is the contact," Chip said.

Chip and Serdar Bankaci, founder of Pennsylvania-based Default Research Inc., said the quality of their data also gives them a competitive edge over other sites, including ForeclosurePoint.

Chip said much of Foreclosure.com's information comes from lenders and, in some cases, from workers who physically check filings at government offices.

Bankaci said Default Research collects all its own foreclosure information from courthouses and other filing locations. For that reason, his company focuses only on major metro markets with heavy investor activity, including Pima and Maricopa counties as well as counties in Florida, California, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Washington.

"There's a difference between a company that resells data versus a company that collects data," Bankaci said, adding that many national foreclosure services buy information from title companies.

Matty, of ForeclosurePoint, declined to specify exactly where his company's information originates.

"We use various means to collect that through technology as well as government and private entities," he said.

In Pima County, initial foreclosure filings, called notices of trustee's sale or notices of sale, can be viewed for free at the County Recorder's Office, 115 N. Church Ave., but you have to visit the office in person to find them — and finding notices for particular properties can be difficult. But, hey, you get what you pay for.

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