Cape Coral Real Estate

Yes, these are the top mistakes to avoid in order to have your short sales approved and eventually closed as I experience them with my fellow agents who work with me on short sales.

~ Not submitting multiple offers.
My experience tells me that providing multiple offers to the lender has indeed helped to show that the agent is doing all he/she can do to get the home sold. The multiple offers will make the difference. However, the servicing lenders generally do not like them. There is a second benefit to it: if the selected buyer walks, there is another purchase contract that can carry the deal to close.

~ Not submitting a proposal.
Many short sale agents just send a complete short sale package. It is true that you must have complete documentation, but it is important to draft a full proposal, as well. Organizing your request to approve a short sale has often made the difference between success and failure with the agents.
Also, many agents still think that the servicing lender is the one who approves the short sale and that they can actually negotiate with that lender’s “negotiator”. However, most loan notes are actually owned by the SMI and either they, or an MI insurance carrier if they have paid off a claim, approve or reject the short sale.

~ Not communicating adequately with parties.
Buyers are patient to a limit. Same with Communicating cooperating agents. You may think about weekly updates to all parties, more often when things happen. You can put a password protected area in your website where buyers and all parties can review the updates. Buyers must be part of the process and be motivated to hang in there when approval takes a long time.

~ Hardship.
Not meeting the definition of “hardship”. Like a criminal case wherein each element of the criminal statute must be proved, in short sale cases the hardship letter and financial documents must prove each element necessary for a secondary market investor to render a finding of “hardship”, and approve the short sale. The hardship letter must contain certain elements, without which, the case will be rejected. Make sure to get it right in the first place because a second attempt will ruined the authenticity of the transaction.

~ The lender’s net.
That’s what will make a short sale go through or not at the end of the day. The most important reason that a short sale is not approved is not meeting the net to lender, calculating the minimum threshold percentage of the fair market value. In the past, secondary market investors utilized the short sale versus REO comparison analysis to approve or reject a short sale. However, almost all SMIs have changed over to the minimum threshold analysis. That analysis ignores the amount of the debt and focuses on proof of the current fair market value of the property. For different SMIs and even different products, there is a set minimum threshold percentage of the fair market value that must be received in order for the proposal to be approved. Many agents erroneously believe they are still using the old comparison analysis.

So, the bottom line is this:
If a proposal meets the definition of hardship and that hardship is supported by the financial documents, you do nothing to cause the servicing lender to tank the proposal, and the offer meets the net to lender minimum threshold percentage of the fair market value, the short sale will be approved and if a qualified buyer remains, the transaction will close.

Comments (0) Jan 12 2010

If you are a Real Estate agent, you will most likely be confronted to short sales soon or later, especially if you are in Florida. Here are some tips to master those short sales.

First start off listing the property right in the mid range of all the other comps and current listings in the neighborhood. If the comps and current listings range from $150K – $180K for example, then you want to
start off listing your property around $165K.

Secondly, you reduce the list price by about 3% each week until you receive an offer on the property.
So in this example you would drop the list price by about $5K each week until you received a solid offer.

Remember, when you first list the property you will also be submitting a COMPLETED Short Sale packet to the lender (with a lowball offer)… Once you do this the lender will order a BPO which will usually take 3-4 weeks to complete.

So in this example, by the third week of lowering your list price you would be the lowest priced property in the area, which would also be about the same time that the BPO would be completed by the lender.

This means that when you do receive a solid offer on the property, you will be able to get an answer from the lender very quickly, now that the BPO has already been done.

Another possibility in this situation is that you drop the list price from $165K to $160K after the first week and you then get an offer on the property… Now you can leave the list price at $160K while you work on getting this very strong offer approved by the lender…

Remember, if you started listing it to low, you would never have received an offer this high…
When you use this strategy you can also show the lender your activity report on the property. You can show them that you made an attempt to get them the highest possible offer.

Here is why this is important…

The lender knows if they ever had to Foreclose on the property, they would have to pay attorney fees, auctions fees, and the process may take more than 6 months.

And that’s not all…

After all that time and money, they would have to list the property as an REO and do the same thing that you just did! List the property and then keep dropping the price until they get an offer.

Here is the key…

By showing the lender that you have already done exactly what they would have to do, and that you can save them 6 months of expenses, it will make your offer much more likely to get approved. If you can get a dollar number for those expenses, the bank will see you know what you talking about and will most likely follow you advice, and even gives you more listings.

This is the only way to make sure your Short Sales get completed in a timely manner and you don’t waste your valuable time with listings that sit on the market with no activity for months.

Comments (0) Dec 01 2009