Caroline Tsou

May this new year adorn your life with many beautiful things and sweet memories to cherish forever.

And care of those whom the heart holds close, along with abundant joys and happiness, for you and your family.

Wishing you life's best this New Year.

With love and appreciation at Christmastime and always.

Wishing you a beautiful holiday season and a new year of peace and happiness.

There are 4 stages in a short sale transaction:

1. Offer solicitation stage I
This stage is controlled by the seller and time frame shall be as short as possible. A good agent shall be able to help you price your house to get offers within a week the house is listed on the market.

2. Lender approval stage
This stage is controlled by the lenders and can be anywhere from 2 months to 6 months depending on who the lenders are and how many lenders (liens) are on the property.

3. Offer solicitation stage II
By the time we get the short sale approvals from the lenders few months after the house was initially listed, most likely we lost all the offers to purchase the house. We will need to start the offer solicitation stage again with the new price that is approved by the lenders. Most offers come in at this stage will be substantially below the lender's approval price so we may need to counter offer back and forth between the buyers and the lenders. The counter offer process may take up to couple of months since lender's approval process is very slow.

4. Escrow Stage
Once an offer is accepted by the seller and approved by the lenders, we open escrow. This will take approximately one month.

As you can see, sellers need to price the house aggressively in order to receive offers within first week the house is on the market in order to minimize time required on selling the property.

I am an experienced short sale agent who can help you negotiate non-deficient judgments on your liens whenever possible to minimize damage to your credit and sell your house successfully. Please call Caroline Tsou at (626) 922-8408 if you are interested in short selling your property.

If a short sale property is already listed at below market price, how much shall a buyer offer on the property? To answer this, we need to understand seller's and lender's prospective first.

1. Seller's Prospective
Since sellers owe more than the house's worth, they will not net any profit once the house is sold. Therefore, seller will sign any offers presented.

2. Lender's Prospective
Lenders are the ones who will suffer the financial lost on a short sale. Therefore, they have the right to approve or disapprove the short sale. However, since lenders stand to lose more money if the house is foreclosed, they are actually more willing to negotiate on the short sale than taking it back. Lender's decision is mostly based on not selling the property below certain percentage of the appraisal value and the percentage guideline varies from lender to lender.

When making offers on short sale properties, it is important to start with very low price since lenders always counter offer multiple times to get higher price from the buyer. The counter offer stage may take as long as 2 to 3 months.

It is not an absolute guideline but from my experience, I will suggest starting with 20% below asking price and counter offer upwards to about 10% below asking price.

Since short sales takes about 2 to 6 months to transact from making the initial offer to close the escrow, it will only work for those buyers who have time and patient to see a good deal through.

I am an experience short sale agent who can help you purchase a property with great condition at a bargain price. Please call me at (626) 922-8408 if you are interested in buying a short sale property.

I had a lot of buyers asking me about the difference between purchasing bank owned and short sales properties. Below is a quick comparison chart:

Since most short sale purchase takes a long time to realize, the transaction can easily fall apart due to seller's change in financial situation or buyer finding another home.

For buyers who have the time and patient to wait for a short sale approval from the lenders, they will most likely end up with a property in excellent condition at a price 10% below bank owned properties and less buyers fighting over the same house.