Many vacation houses along Long Neck, Delaware are seeing Bank Foreclosure Listings. And second-home buyers are scampering to purchase these properties because of their bargain prices.

For example, a three-bathroom, three-bedroom foreclosed house is sold at only $210,000, an estimated $150,000 less than the property’s worth three years ago. Meanwhile, the vacant lot beside the beach house was on Bank Foreclosure Listings but with a higher price.

Many of these distressed vacation houses were purchased during the peak of the housing market by owners who were expecting that market values would continue to rise. Now, these properties in Maryland and Delaware are becoming popular purchases by bargain-hunting, second-home buyers.

While market data showed that sales of houses in beach towns are still insignificant, some industry experts said that bargain-hunting has driven buying activity this year after a slow down in 2008. Most of these bargain-hunting homebuyers are interested on foreclosures or short sales.

Unlike in previous years, finding beach properties on Bank Foreclosure Listings is very easy to do now. In May, the median selling price in the condominium market in Ocean City was $335,000, representing over 20 percent drop from the same month in 2007.

A property along Delaware’s coast cost $368,000, a drop of 13 percent from May 2007. According to real estate experts, many foreclosed homes on the market are being sold at low percentage from the original listing price. This indicates that many home sellers are willing to negotiate with buyers which was not the case at the start of the economic downturn.

Nationwide, the market for vacation homes plummeted last year by almost 30.8 percent or 512,000 properties from a high of 740,000 two years ago.

Data from the National Association of Realtors showed that as of June 29, about 309 properties had been sold along the Delaware coast. This means that the pace of home selling this year is significantly slower than the previous year which registered 829 home sales. Homes sold in 2007 totaled 1,123.

But industry experts are seeing signs of improvement as homebuyers are lured to the vacation home market by very low prices and mortgage rates.

And many homebuyers are willing to wait and go through the tedious process of purchasing distressed properties on Bank Foreclosure Listings in order to gain even bigger savings.