Geoffrey Lamb

This is what your buyer wants to see:

Not everyone can have perfect grass or a brick lined patio but the closer you can make your lawn look like it belongs in a magazine, the faster you will sell. Even with Short Sales, the process of buying is emotional, like falling in love but only... with a house. Sure, your home may have it's problems but like relationships; the fewer problems, the more likely a buyer will fall in love with it. The price will only get buyers to your door, proper exterior maintenance is the easiest & least expensive thing you can do to make the most positive impact on short selling your home and preventing foreclosure.

One of the most difficult things to convey to a homeowner with limited resources is the important of both the price and the condition. This is a difficult market and buyer agents (if given a choice) would prefer not to show or sell short sales. They assume that it will take a long time, be difficult, or not close at all. Of course, this is the case in the majority of our short sale listings in Charlotte, but it doesn't matter. That's the perception that we all have to deal with and so to help correct the problem, the house needs to look its best for every single showing.

If you're really serious about a successful Short Sale, here are 10 easy and inexpensive things you can do to prepare the exterior of your home for a Spring/Summer buyer's market.

1. Keep grass mowed to a height no greater than 4-6 inches. This usually means that you have it trimmed at least every other week.
2. Properly edge around house, mailbox, trees, and other transition areas. A sharp edge to your lawn adds the finishing touch. What would the interior of your home be like without door frames or baseboards?
3. Trim all small trees and hedges. This does not usually require a power trimmer, a hand held pruning tool is sufficient to recreate that manicured look.
4. Perk up flower beds. Pull all weeds, create a natural defined edge along the perimeter with a flat head shovel, and then cover with fresh pine needles or mulch.
5. Give your home a bath. Especially with vinyl siding, a half day with a pressure washer can add thousands in "virtual value" to your home. These usually rent for about $75 and are very easy to operate. Just be careful to use the correct spray nozzle and setting.
6. Pressure wash driveway and other concrete surfaces. Again, use the correct settings. You do not want it to have lines or irregular patterns of cleanliness. Use a fan spray and remember that your goal is to simply clean the concrete and lighten its appearance. You don't need to make it look brand new again.
7. Pressure wash then refinish decking. The rear deck can be viewed as a benefit or a detriment. Refinishing adds appeal, even to newer decks but if the wood is rotten, add new coat of stain or paint and buyers will rarely notice.
8. Replace or repaint your mailbox, make sure the numbers are easy to see, and plant a flower bed around it if neighborhood restrictions allow. The mailbox is the absolute first thing your buyer sees.
9. Make sure outside amenities are truly amenities and not just something the buyer will have to "deal with." This includes storage buildings, pools, built in basket ball goals, swing sets, and boat docks. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but everything matters to a buyer. Sometimes, its better to haul off old storage buildings than to leave them as an eye sore.
10. Make sure our Sign reflects the quality of your house. Spray it off occasionally and make sure that it remains standing perpendicular to the ground. Every time one of our agents shows your home, they will correct problems, but a leaning sign just looks bad and should really be corrected immediately.

My company, The LAMB Group; is a regional leader as was one of the very first Short Sale listing agent in Charlote NC. A lot of information can be found here at this blog, as well as my website, www.lambrealtors.com.

For most agents, taking a short sale listing can be like throwing a wrench into a smoothly running machine. Unless you reorganize your entire business, listing and selling just a single short sales can drain your resources and effectively prevent you from closing potentially two or even three other listings. Maybe not for everyone but that's what other agents tell me over and over again.

I also know firsthand because I did them alone for years with no help and no systems to make the process easy or efficient. And frankly, I was broke because of it. It wasn't until I made the commitment to specialize in Short Sales, and hire staffing specifically for Short Sales, that I was able to finally make any money at all. Even now, the profit margin is miniscule compared to typical brokerage but over the years, I've added systems and procedures to maximize productivity an increase success so that almost every single listing sells. Only recently have I finally managed to make working in the Short Sale business profitable.

As an individual agent with less than 12-20 short sales and no assistants, I know it's nearly impossible to close a short sale quickly and do it in a way that actually nets you something in return for your time. But these days, despite the low return and high effort, everyone does short sales because if you don't then your listings don't sell. I get it and it's for that reason that I rarely take non-short sale listings. But that works for me and it probably works for a lot of other short sale specialists because our business is geared towards that and designed to work in this arena of brokerage. A lot of you hate it (just as I do sometimes :-) and that's probably why about 25% of my listings are actually referred to me by local Realtors. In the end, its guess really about what works for you that determines whether you list it, or refer it.

I'm closing on a listing next week that's $280k (almost 400k mortgage!) and I'll pay about $2,500 to one of the area's most experienced REO agents for the referral. She's been in the business a lot longer than me and I'm pretty sure that she has a staff of her own so of course, she could easily close a short sale. But she chooses not to because this is not her specialty. She's said a couple of times that to take on something else would just prevent her from focusing on what she's best at. Plus, she just really hates to deal with them. Now, she can just ignore short sales, refer them out and a few months later she gets a check for $2500. The only thing she has to do is send an email.

Just as I did back in 2005, a lot of Realtors have decided to start targeting short sales and trying to focus on that specifically. Well, for the masses of agents who have taken the CSP or SFR designation courses, I still want your referrals too! I've really enjoyed being able to help so many local agents and I want to be able to do more in that area by devising a plan which incentivizes even those out there who don't know me to send your referrals to me. After doing the math on my end, I'll be writing her that $2,500 check gladly and to be honest, it could be for even more. One short sale can cost a general brokerage agent a lot of time (which is money, too) but for me, it's really just one more listing. Everything I do is based on bulk and the more listings I have which all have exactly the same requirements, the easier it is to address those requirements and with even greater success.

So in order to increase this branch of my business, I'm making an offer to any Realtor across the nation of increased referral fees, up to 40%for short sale listings over 300k but increased rates for lower priced homes as well. I only ask for your pictures, measurements, and the use of the lockbox you placed when you first listed the property. This saves me a little money because it keeps me from having to pay a runner to visit the property immediately. We do go out, we just do it in bulk a couple of times per month. Obviously, I want your listings and of course, I think it has a lot of benefits for you and your clients as well. My chart is below, this is new and this posting isn't just an advertisement, I would welcome your feedback. What would it take for you, to refer your short sale to me? :--)

Well, I wrote about the coming change to Bank of America's short sale processing a few months ago and now it is upon us in full force. The LAMB Group specializes in Short Sales in Charlotte and as a result, I've had the opportunity to work with the new "Equator" system on about 18 of our listings in 2010. For those of you who haven't heard yet, the new website called Equator has certainly changed the way that Bank of America and now GMAC short sales are being handled. Short Sale specialists in Charlotte NC and around the country can agree, this system is better than it used to be but to what extent is yet to be proven.

It seems to me that the first phases of valuation and paperwork submission are much better. You can begin a short sale online and upload all of the paperwork with a certainty that they will get it. No more lost faxes! They get the BPO done almost immediately, last week one was completed even before we had access to the home. The BPO agent was actually the very first person to see just how distressed this property was. There is more data entry now, but I don't mind it so much. I think that it puts more of the control over accuracy on my staff and its really better that way. We're the ones who have to deal with mistakes so at least now if a mistake is made, its ours and we can devise a plan to correct it in the future (rather than just dealing with it like before). Once all of the initial setup is complete, they wait for the offer from the listing agent.

Many of our short sale listings in Charlotte get offers immediately. Hell, there's this one guy who has some spam offer making software that submits a "robo-offer" on every single short sale home we list. If you have short sale listing or foreclosures in Charlotte then you've probably received one too. Well, one of the things I like most about Equator is the fact that you can get immediate declinations. So, if the offer is crap, then they spit it back out in just a couple of days.

Now here's the part that keeps me questioning this new system. Once the valuation and paperwork is done, once the offer has been submitted and reviewed, they give preliminary acceptance on it and you think, "Wow, that was fast!" No, it wasn't. Now, we wait, just like always. They claim that the wait is not supposed to be longer than 21 days from that point but it's always longer. At least now, they seem to care about us having to wait and give options for escalation that can be effective. I have seen the average time from one of our BofA short sale go from 5 or 6 weeks in December to maybe 4 or 5 weeks now so there is some slight improvement. Only time will tell if they begin to fully utilize the software but in the end, it's the number of humans making decisions on the back end which need to increase. Once we have more negotiators and more managers at all levels of the process, then we'll have faster decisions. Until then, we'll just continue to wait.

Bank of America is shifting direction with its Short Sale processes by utilizing a lot of the same procedures and software as their REO asset managers use. This seems to only be in test mode currently, with just a small segment of their files, but it does mark the beginning of the end of the dread we all have for these kinds of transactions.

Anyone who sells short sales knows that Bank of America is one of the slowest banks out there, so to see that they're one of the first to get on board with the streamlined short sale concept was something that everyone at The LAMB Group was very happy about. We probably have about a dozen or more BOA short sales and on more than half, we have offers. But they're just sitting there, waiting for the BOA SS process to run its lengthy course. Our nightmares don't go on for 6 or eight months like some horror stories I've heard, but we have seen these take as long as four months....and that's just not acceptable.

But they're trying and so I have to give Bank of America's Short Sale department some credit for that. Last week, we noticed a fraction of their files were transferred to what some of the BOA reps were calling "BofA Servicing." I'm not sure if that's their final name for it since their new servicing website is named differently and even that name, we hear, will be changing soon. Whatever Bank of America decides to call it, under this plan Borrower's received new account reps, new account numbers, and now The LAMB Group has an online portal with which to access account updates and can use for communications with the negotiators. What's even better is that this portal can act as a hub between all parties in the transaction, helping to break down barriers and make everyone more available to each other. We already offer something similar for all of our short sale listings in Charlotte NC but nothing on this level. I'm hoping that its implementation will make our short sale listings close much faster in the future and will lead the way for other major lending institutions as well.

It looks like there's a change coming in the short sale industry, news of which is leaving a lot of Charlotte Short Sale Listings specialists with eager anticipation. Fannie Mae lead the way about 6 months ago with new requirements that forced many banks to start expediting the approval process for Fannie Mae short sales and also, enforcing the negotiated commission amount to the Charlotte NC REALTOR, and REALTORS everywhere. Short Sale specialists haven't seen a lot of impact from that decision yet, however; this type of decision (while not always imposed immediately) does produce reverberations. Now, the treasury is finally extending its Making Home Affordable plan to the short sale industry after delaying the onset most of this year. This proposal now pays both the first and second mortgage lenders $1,000. to do a short sale but even better, it's paying the homeowner $1,500! I LOVE that part. How cool will it be to do a listing presentation where you can finally offer them something tangible? And probably the best part of this new proposal is that they are stipulating time lines for offer acceptance. 6 weeks to 6 months is no longer an option, their new goal will be 30 days from start to finish. Of course, this is just something that's being proposed by the government and for those of you that know about loan modifications, you probably heard that 6 months into the "Making Home Affordable" plan, exactly 35 people actually received modifications nationwide. They're doing better now, but the banks are large and no change comes quickly for them. Hopefully, in a year or so, buyer agents will stop dreading the short sale and it will be about as easy as a typical REO. Oh and this plan, like the one from Fannie Mae, will block the bank from cutting our commission at close. It's about time, I'm tired of working twice as hard and getting paid 15% less. And I'm sure that most buyer agents would just assume sell the home across the street at 3% and go under contract in 3 days, than to have to sell my short sale listing at 2.5% and wait 6 weeks. Hopefully, soon, there will be no difference in either