Short Sale Series-Part Seven

Part 7-Final Thoughts and Advice

For Realtors. I wanted to make an even stronger appeal to Realtors who think that they can do a short sale by on the job training. It won't work. Get training, mentoring, and your CDPE designation. Short of that, excuse the pun, if you refer to someone who knows how to do this and cares, you can get a fee and it just might close. Also please remember that this is not a normal sale, and these are very distressed homeowners. You need to act like a PhD psychologist to start. Then you need to understand that if you screw this up people and their families are adversely affected. Are you willing to tell them oh well I tried. That is no where good enough and you should be brought before your local Board and Commission. If you do it right, then credit can be restored in a much smaller time for these folks, and you will have their loyalty and gratitude.

For Buyers. Please don't enter into a short sale transaction if you don't have the staying power or you really have a contingency you haven't told your Realtor about. If you can follow through, and if you are truly non-contingent then you are walking into an instant profit on paper. Also understand the risk. You cannot do an interest rate lock until you are sure that all the t's and i's are crossed and dotted. If you want a sure thing buy a new house at a premium figure that is finished. For me, even a .5% increase in a rate is worth having when you are getting 5 figure reductions in real value.

Two warnings for everyone.

Lawyers. No I am not going to make the standard lawyer jokes. What I am warning about is that real real estate law is an acquired skill. Law schools teach contracts, but don't spend a lot of time of real estate. Folks, that's not where the big money is. I recently had a short sale that was about to close after the owner finished a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Tow days before the attorney filed a Chapter 7 liquidation with the advice that there was no advantage to the short sale. Gee thanks for extending the credit problem about 5 years. A foreclosure is worse than a bankruptcy and has been for the 20 years I have been in real estate.

BA/Countrywide. This is the true Nightmare on Elm Street. Every ones patience will be tested. They make a tortoise look like it is moving like a Ferrari by comparison. They also have a policy that if everything is done but it doesn't close, you have to start over like it never happened. These folks border on criminal in the way that they put people in harms way. It sometimes seems that they really want homes to go into foreclosure to dirty the books. Could this be a TARP ploy? I have no proof but something really stinks about the way they are doing distressed property negotiations, if you could call it a negotiation. I now know of Realtors who are refusing to do Countrywide short sales. We will still do them, but everyone should be informed of the problems before entering a contract to buy.

That's all for now. Thank you for reading the series and I hope it helped.