Bank REO Properties and the Banks That Hold Them

What Are Bank REO Properties?

Bank REO properties are houses, condos and small multifamily buildings that a bank now owns because a borrower stopped paying and the foreclosure sale did not produce a buyer. At that point the bank wants its money back, not a house, so it cleans or repairs the property as it sees fit and puts it up for sale, usually as is.

For you as a buyer, that changes a few things compared with buying from a family. The seller is a bank’s asset department, which has never lived in the home, so it rarely gives a seller’s disclosure from personal knowledge and expects you to inspect at your own cost. Offers usually go through the listing agent the bank hired, and the bank’s own addendum to the purchase contract tends to override parts of the standard form.

The FDIC calls this property “other real estate owned” (ORE) and splits it into homes with 1 to 4 units, construction and land, multifamily buildings, and commercial property. The bank figures throughout cover only the first group, the 1 to 4 family homes, because that is what most buyers mean by a bank-owned home. The number of banks holding them rose from 713 a year earlier to 805 on June 30, 2026, so foreclosed homes are now spread across more lenders.

How Do You Find a Specific Bank’s Foreclosed Homes?

A specific bank’s foreclosed homes are easiest to find when the bank runs its own listing page, but most banks do not. When the websites of 40 of the profiled banks were checked on October 10, 2026, only 7 had a public page or site listing foreclosed homes. They are Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, Fifth Third Bank, FirstBank Puerto Rico, Huntington National Bank, M&T Bank, Regions Bank and SouthState Bank.

For every other bank, three practical routes are open to you.

1. Open the bank’s profile. Each profile says what the bank publishes, who handles its foreclosed homes when that is public, and how its figure has moved over the last 5 quarters.
2. Search ordinary listing sites near you. Most bank-owned homes are posted by a local agent on the multiple listing service (MLS), the shared database that feeds Zillow, Realtor.com and similar sites, often with “REO” or “bank-owned” in the remarks. The listing agent is the person who takes your offer.
3. Check whether the loan belonged to someone else. A bank that only services a loan for another owner does not keep the house, as the next section explains.

The state pages help with the second route. Each one lists the banks and credit unions that have offices in that state and hold foreclosed homes, so you know which seller names to watch for in local listings.

Who Sells Bank-Owned Homes?

Who sells a bank-owned home depends on who owned the mortgage when the borrower stopped paying, which is not always the bank whose name was on the monthly statement. Banks often sell the loans they make and keep collecting payments for the new owner, so one bank can sell some foreclosed homes itself and pass others on.

• The bank itself. For loans it kept, the bank owns the house after foreclosure and sells it through its own REO department or an outside REO asset manager, a company hired to price, repair and list foreclosed homes and to pick the local listing agents.
• Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Homes from loans these two companies bought are sold through their own programs, HomePath for Fannie Mae and HomeSteps for Freddie Mac, using their own approved agents.
• HUD or VA. Homes from FHA-insured loans go to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and are sold on HUD Home Store. Homes from VA-guaranteed loans are sold for the Department of Veterans Affairs by its contractor, Vendor Resource Management, which the VA picked in Circular 26-17-16.

Only the first group shows up in a bank’s FDIC figure, because the FDIC counts property the bank itself owns. The companies that run these sales, from bank asset managers to the platforms that host agency listings, are described in the guide to REO asset management companies. If you are an agent who wants to list foreclosed homes for these sellers, the steps are covered in how to become an REO agent.

How Concentrated Are Bank-Owned Homes?

Bank-owned homes are spread thinly across most banks, while a small group of large and mortgage-heavy banks holds about a third of the dollars. JPMorgan Chase Bank alone held $90.0 million, or 8.4% of the national total, and the 10 largest holders together had 34.2%.

Below the top tier the amounts drop quickly, since only 18 banks held $10 million or more, while 629 of the 805 banks (78.1%) held less than $1 million and the median bank held about $246,000, roughly the value of one or two modest homes. For a buyer, that means most banks with foreclosed homes have only a few on hand at any time, so a local agent who watches new listings will usually spot them sooner than any bank website.

Two patterns stand out in the ranking. Puerto Rico banks hold $46.9 million in foreclosed homes, 4.4% of the national total, led by Banco Popular de Puerto Rico at #3. Size is also not the whole story, since FirsTier Bank of Kimball, Nebraska ranks #8 at $22.7 million, up 472.3% in a year, ahead of Citibank.

What Do the FDIC Figures Leave Out?

The FDIC figures show how much each bank holds in total, not where its foreclosed homes are or how many there are. Three limits matter when you use them.

Whole-institution figures: Each number covers the whole bank in every state where it lends. The state shown next to a bank is where its main office is, which is not always where it does business. Wells Fargo Bank and Citibank both list Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and PNC lists Wilmington, Delaware, yet their foreclosed homes can be anywhere. For that reason the state pages list banks that operate in a state, using the FDIC’s office location data, and never claim the homes sit in that state.

Residential versus total foreclosed property: Total ORE mixes homes with land, apartment buildings and commercial property. Across all 1,401 banks with any ORE, the total was $4.91 billion, and homes were only 21.7% of it. Wells Fargo is the clearest case, with $309.0 million in total ORE but $24.0 million in homes, so a headline built on total ORE would overstate what you can buy from it by more than 12 times.

Dollars, not houses: The figure is the value the bank carries on its books, not a count of homes or an asking price. Several of the largest banks report in whole millions, so their figures end in .0 and small changes can hide inside the rounding.

Banks file these figures under the deadlines in the FFIEC Call Report instructions, and credit unions under NCUA’s Call Report instructions, so each quarter’s numbers arrive about a month after it ends.

How the Directory Was Built

The bank REO directory uses the June 30, 2026 call reports, pulled directly from the FDIC and NCUA on October 10, 2026. Bank figures use the FDIC’s 1 to 4 family foreclosed property field, and credit union figures use NCUA’s consumer real estate foreclosed and repossessed assets, the dollar value of homes a credit union has taken back and not yet sold. Two banks reporting the same value share a rank. Seven banks in the June data have since merged or closed, and none of them has a profile.