Experience The Year and the Life of a Short Sale.

Experience The Year and the Life of a Short Sale.

I just recently successfully closed a short sale listing and tomorrow I will close another. I am very grateful that I was able to help both my sellers get out of the awful situation they were in. One short sale took only 90 days start to finish, the other took almost a year.

I try to explain before the process starts that there will be ups and downs. Extreme ups and downs, depending on your lien holders. I took my Skycrest listing last November and thought it would be a breeze. Wrong! I closed my first short sale in February of 2007. You think the banks would have their act together by now but they don't. They are getting harder and harder to close.

The one I am closing tomorrow (knock on wood) has taken almost a year. There were two loans and the first was Wells Fargo. Wells is a buyer specific lender. What does this mean to you? As a seller when you sell your home as a short sale and you have a buyer specific lender they will only issue the letter of approval to one buyer specifically. So.... if that buyer doesn't stay loyal to the property by the time you get your letter the process has to start all over. Each time you loose your buyer it can take up to 3 - 6 months again to get your approval, it's brutal.

When I took the listing I listed it slightly below market value at $285K.
We received an offer right away and began the short sale process with both lien holders. Within a few months I had short sale approval on the first with Wells Fargo and was waiting on the second with Citi. Because Citi didn't have the approval within a few weeks of Wells now approaching the three month mark the buyer walked because they had found another home. Unfortunately as soon as the buyer walked Wells closed the file.

I put the home back on the market and sold it again.
Keep in mind when you hire a short sale agent you need one that can both negotiate a short sale and be able to sell your home over and over if need be. As the days on the market calculate it gets more and more difficult to keep giving the lien holders the same offer they have already approved. When the file closed the first time I lost my negotiator from Wells, I received a new one but his turn time dragged on forever no matter how hard I pushed.

After loosing the buyer three times before the written approvals I
finally had one stay true to the property all the way to the approval or what I thought was the approval but it wasn't. Wells Fargo approved the short sale $35K more than the offer in. What? They said the BPO had expired past the 90 days of the last one and they ordered another and the value came in at $310K.

A BPO is a Broker Price Opinion done by the lien holders representative.
The BPO is only good for 90 days. So when it expired they got another one. The problem I had was the fact their rep didn't even access the property. All is they did was give the bank the last closed sale which was completely superior to my listing. Being the little spit fire I am I fought the BPO and got another one. Low and behold it came in where I needed it to.

Unfortunately Wells Fargo's $310K approval freaked out the buyers and they walked too. At this point I'm trying everything not to loose my mind with frustration against the negotiator with hundreds of files on his desk. I put the house back on the market again, got ANOTHER OFFER and stayed on top of the negotiator every day expressing concern of getting this deal closed. Thank goodness he lives in another state otherwise he may had put a restraining order on me. I just couldn't stand not getting this done for my client. Foreclosure wasn't an option I wasn't a quitter no matter how long it took.

I am so thankful this story has a happy ending because after a year
we finally had a buyer stay loyal, get approval, go through escrow and we are scheduled to record tomorrow. Most short sales don't take this long but every once in awhile you have to just take the good with the bad and keep fighting forward for your client.