Selling Your Short Sale AS-IS? Great! You'll Still Be Wise to Get It SHOW READY.

Selling Your Short Sale AS-IS? Great! You'll Still Be Wise to Get It SHOW READY.

There's been a lot of discussion in my Northern Virginia real estate business this week about the meaning of AS-IS when it comes to selling a Short Sale. There are two issues that seem to come up again and again.

You can't sell your home in a Short Sale if you can't get a buyer to write an offer. The homes in the Northern Virginia marketplace are show ready. That means they are clean and decluttered. If you can't bear to do either of these things, you are going to have a hard time finding a buyer willing to save you from foreclosure. It takes some effort to get a home show ready, but it is worth it if you are serious about avoiding foreclosure.

If a home is vacant, having utility service on in the home is strongly advised. It helps the property show well and it will be mission critical if you end up under contract with a buyer that has an appraisal contingency. The appraiser will not complete an appraisal if the home does not have the utilities in working order when they arrive. So if you want your buyer to get their loan, you better keep the utilities on.

Clearly, if you are having financial difficulty and keeping the utilities on in the home is a burden, make sure that your buyer is the one contractually obligated to have the utilities turned on. In it's boiler plate form, the Northern Virginia Regional Sales Contract makes it a seller's sole responsibility to have the utilities in service up to and including the date of settlement.

When you are selling a home in AS-IS condition, it means you are not obligated to make repairs. That's what AS-IS means. It doesn't mean a buyer is expecting to run around in a cluttered and messy home. It doesn't mean that you have no contractual obligation to keep utilities in service. It just means that a buyer is made aware that repairs needed on the home will be at their sole expense.