Geoffrey Lamb

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

I am sooo over leadstreet and i couldn't be happier. I have been working for years to keep my Charlotte NC Real Estate website at the top of rankings but then to have all my clients say that they hate the search feature and would rather use Allen Tate!! Arahhh! :-) I'vbe been fighting Ecare at RE/MAX ever since the change to the inferior IDX solution but they don't seem to care. I really think e-neighborhoods is paying them to use it (or something) because leadstreet sucks and it's so beneath RE/MAX to use such garbage as thier primary search tool. I just switched over to an independent solution from www.idxbroker.com. It's fully customizable and has lots of cool stuff that leadstreet was totally missing. Especially in the back office part where I can track my visitors every click and see what they did, even when they don't give me many details. Plus, it juts looks nicer and has more features, basically what you'd expect from today's technologies. You should check it out, it's really cool! Just go to my site for Charlotte NC Real Estate. Bye for now!

Pre-foreclosures are on the rise, as are the rest of those types of properties that exist as a result of unethical lending practices and new homes sales techniques. We listed 7 new pre-foreclosure short sales just last week and I hear it every single day from some new distressed homeowner. How they paid 10% too much for their home because the new home builder told them it'd be a great investment or their loan adjusted to 12% making monthly payments impossible. We do have a problem with Short Sales but it's not the agents who are helping these people out of a bad situation who are at fault, it's those people who got them there in the first place. Sure we can say that personal responsibility would help to prevent someone's home from becoming a pre-foreclosure but the truth is, many people just aren't that educated regarding these issues. They barely understand high school math, (not being mean, just a fact) so they have no hope with the residential loan application. But whomever may be to blame for the rise in Charlotte pre-forclosure listings , the fact remains that our economy stinks and a lot of damage was done over the past few years by the lending and new construction industries. The'll be a lot more short sales in Charlotte NC coming soon.

If you happen to be an investor who's looking for an undervalued property, or an agent with investor clients, we have possibly more pre-foreclosures (that you can actually buy) than anyone else. Since we list (on average) about one new pre-foreclosure home per day, we maintain a mailing list of investors and their agents who receive first notification of these homes, even before we place them in the MLS. Just visit www.PreForeclosureWorks.comfor a comprehensive list of our preforeclosure listings and also our sign-up sheet.

Wow, I knew keeping up this Charlotte homes for sale blog would be hard to impossible and I was right. I think its been a long time since my last post about Charlotte NC real estate but I'm going to try harder. I may even have to pay someone to do it for me but I'm sick of bouncing around in the rankings. My site, www.lambrealtors.com was #6 at Yahoo for Charlotte NC Real Estate and overnight it dropped off the top 100. What the hell? I didn't really make any changes to the content of the site, just the flash header but now, they don't like me anymore. Still have all the same information about homes for sale in Charlotte NC, just not the same rank. We'll fix it but it has to start with more blogging, they all seem to like them a lot. Anyway, more to come!