It was a pleasant, beautiful sunny day today as the San Jose Short Sale Agent drove around previewing some homes while listening to some oldies on the radio.   It turned into a much nicer day when my client who was closing on his short sale today, invited me to lunch after he picked up his check for the $3000 relocation assistance check from his HAFA short sale.  He was so excited that the nightmare was ending, that he wanted to celebrate with me.

 

It a little over two months ago when he contacted me, feeling he was at the end of his ropes.  Chase had just informed him they were denying his request for a loan modification after dragging it out for months and the prospect of staying in his home was now up in the air.  But he had made up his mind.  He realized, despite his emotional attachment, he could no longer afford to keep the home.  He had to give it up and move on with his life and make a new life for him and his family.

 

In a little over two months, that same lender – Chase - was willing to allow him to sell his home for a loss, forgive him the deficiency, but on top of that gave him a check for $3,000 to help with the relocation to his new rental.   As we were discussing over  dim sum lunch, he was so happy and grateful that he is able to move forward without the burden of his mortgage, he seemed like a different man.  He was saying he could not sleep even last night, because he was concerned that something could go wrong and we would not be able record the deed and close escrow today.  He was going to sleep well tonight!

 

We were discussing why more people who are in similar situation as himself would not choose his route if they were unable to get loan modifications or otherwise afford to keep their homes.  We came to the conclusion it is probably due to lack of information.  If distressed homeowners knew that their income tax exemptions and the benefits of financial incentives from HAFA were ending soon, they would probably take decisive action as to prevent missing out on those valuable benefits.  He would tell his friends whom he knows are having difficulty paying their mortgages to take action.

 

Dear reader, if you or someone you know, are in a similar situation where you have come to the conclusion that you cannot afford to keep your home, but you cannot sell your home either because of the debt you owe to the banks, please take action soon and before this year is up.  Naturally, if you reside in the greaterSilicon Valley, I would love to help you so you can move forward with a new chapter in your life. 

 

However, I am not saying you have to come to me necessarily; I respectfully and sincerely urge you to talk to someone who is an expert in the field of Short Sale  and get help soon before the two programs expire.   I think I would not be doing my job and my personal quest to help as many people fight foreclosures if I were not educating people about programs that are available; yet many people are not taking advantage due to lack of information.       

 

Please talk to someone.  Indecision means you are making a decision to allow foreclosure to happen to you.  

I read an article this morning about another local teacher getting arrested for molesting a child.  As a parent, this is really upsetting when teacher who are entrusted to educate your children are accused of molesting them.

 

As parents, we can’t be everywhere or know everything, but we can at least protect our children by learning where the 63,000 California registered sex offenders reside in our neighborhoods.  Sex offenders are required to register their residence in California.  These convicted ex-teachers will at least be tracked in the future.  

 

Whether you are a home buyer searching for a new home; or you are a resident who wish to see if a registered sex offender has recently moved into your neighborhood; or perhaps you frequent a local park and want to know if a registered offender lives near by where your children play.   There is public record information made available to you.

 

InCaliforniathe Attorney General’s Office provides the public with access to such information on a website.    

 

http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov/

 

Arm yourself with knowledge. 

How do you know someone has the technical, marketing and negotiational know-how to successfully help homeowners fight the devastation of foreclosures?  Practice and experience are the keys to success; everything else is secondary or simple marketing gimmicks.    

 

An expert does not merely engage in puffery regarding receiving nice titles and designations, they also bring about actual experience in favorable methodologies like short sales to help negotiate settlements to successful closings for clients.  Real life experiences along with the incidental designations and certifications to bring about a complete skill-set which is actually beneficial to the homeowners.  Some happy clients will even write up reviews about your wonderful service if you really helped them out of a bind.  

   

Unfortunately, practitioners in distressed real estate markets have been falling into two categories lately.  There is one camp where the practitioner actually learns and take classes and builds experiences for the benefits of their clients.  They do everything, like how real estate used to be.  I fall into this category.  When clients hire me, they know who will serve them from beginning to end; they know exactly who is representing their interests.

 

Then there is the new trend: practitioners take the short cut and hire a “third party short sale servicer or negotiator” to help them negotiate and settle with the lenders.  Often times, the clients have no idea that someone else they never met or agreed to, is handling the most important aspect of the short sale transaction.  I don’t know about you, but if I hired someone to do a job for me, then I expect that person to complete the entire job, not hire out someone they can hire for the least amount of money to do the hard part.  I believe in quality control and I cannot control the quality of a person who takes on dozens of other agents’ workload.  How much of their heart will they put into one of those files?  Probably no more than the counterpart negotiator who is overloaded with files of homeowners at the banks.  That is why I do not use; nor hire my skills out to lesser experienced agents for money.  

 

With my clients, they know exactly who is doing everything from the marketing to final negotiating to sitting with them at the signing table at the closing.  I guess I share the same philosophy as Steve Jobs at Apple: vertical integration of both hardware and software to control quality and end user experience.  I control the full experience that the client has with my service: both the marketing to sell the house and the negotiations with lenders to have them release the liens and deficiency claims for less than what is owed and everything in between.  Conceptually, you can have two approaches:  the Apple approach or the Microsoft approach.  I just happen to believe in the Apple approach as being more efficient and effective.  If you believe in the Microsoft approach, your selection if fine, as long as you were informed others would be doing the negotiations and other tasks.  Full disclosure.  

 

So back to the question about how do you know someone has the necessary practice and experience?  Ask for proof of successful closing to demonstrate their personal experience.  

 

I am mad as hell as I write this entry.  Once again, dual track foreclosure has proven to be alive and well and being practiced by one of the large banks in Silicon Valley.

 

What is dual track foreclosure?  Simply put, it is when the lender agrees to work with homeowners on a loan modification request, but also continues its foreclosure effort simultaneously.  If the homeowners are being given the chance to work on a loan modification, why not stop the foreclosure effort until the resolution of the modification request?   The problem is that by permitting the homeowners to work on a loan modification, it gives them the false impression that the foreclosure action has halted during the loan modification process.   Those homeowners whose loan modifications are rejected are discovering that their homes are being foreclosed soon thereafter, often not giving them enough time to prepare to deal with the loan modification, let alone the foreclosure.     In even worse scenarios, the homeowners are being foreclosed on while they are anxiously awaiting answers to the loan modifications.  Homeowners are given false hopes of saving their homes through a loan modification, but while they are working through the process, their homes get unceremoniously snatched away without warning.    

  

Legislative efforts were made earlier in the year in California to try to stop this deceptive practice by the lenders, but it never passed.   The lobbying efforts of the lending institution were sufficient to get the bill killed in the California Senate.  The despicable practice is still not illegal and being widely practiced.

 

Being the San Jose Short Sale Agent, I received a call from a prospect today who was referred to me by a recent client for whom I completed a successful short sale.  He wanted me to help him because he spoke with someone at Wells Fargo who kindly informed him that they denied his loan modification and by the way, they are going to foreclose and sell his home (court house auction) next week.   Here is an example of a dual track foreclosure at work.

 

This homeowner had trouble making his mortgage payments because his wife had lost her job.  They went from a two income family for which they qualified their loan to a single income family.  They had been working with Wells Fargo since April of this year to get qualified for a loan modification.   After months of providing documentation, they were told a few days ago that their loan modification was being rejected.  And also, by the way, the foreclosure auction (Notice of Trustee Sale) had been scheduled for next week.  When the homeowner asked if he could get a 30 days extension to hire a Realtor to do a short sale, they rejected that request as well.

 

I would love to help this homeowner, but the problem is, with less than a week to go before the auction date, I cannot stop this trustee sale from taking place.  Even if I had a viable offer in hand, most lenders and Wells Fargo, specifically, will not stop the sale if the sale is scheduled to take place in less than 7 days.    Had the homeowner called me a week or two ago, I could have worked some magic, but now with less than a week to go before the sale date, he is out of options.   Had he not relied solely on the bank to and taken other steps, we could have prepared him for a HAFA short sale and probably gotten him $6,000 to pay off the second lien and another $3,000 in relocation expenses.  Instead, he will get nothing for months and months of waiting for that dream in the sky.

 

Some of you skeptical readers out there may be wondering if I may be exaggerating how often dual track foreclosures may be occurring in the real world? More often than you would like to believe and sometimes with confusing results.

Family Fights to Keep Home After Accidental Sale - Local News - Sacra Men To, CA - Msnbc

For homeowners out there who are  working on loan modifications, do not put all of your hopes into that one basket.  The chances of homeowners getting successful permanent loan modifications are small to begin with, most receive a temporary modification or are summarily rejected like the person who called me today.   So protect yourself and  consider multiple options, do not make the mistake of believing that the lender will have your best interest at heart.

 

 

 

A prospective client came asking for help.  She had a short sale specialist working on her case for over a year.  The thing was, this agent was not even local (from San Diego) and would only tell her that things were going well for well over a year; not much communication, just that things were OK every few months.  The distance probably had something to do with the lack of continual communication.

 

Only recently, did she receive a call from him saying the lender would not be approving the short sale and would now be foreclosing. This came as a complete shock to her.  She said the agent was basically backing out and telling her that he could no longer help her.  She wanted to know if I could help by replacing him.

 

It’s easy to wonder why someone would simply trust an agent for over a year and not ask questions or demand that she be kept apprised of the status of the short sale more frequently than a few times a year.  I pulled up the county record to see how much time was remaining on a Notice of Trustee Sale (NOT) and to see if we could save the short sale.  My search found that the NOT was filed over 3 months ago.  I needed to get more information.

 

I asked her to get a copy of her file since the agent was essentially firing himself and I needed to know what type of communication had been initiated and what the lenders had agreed to in writing.  I also asked her to get me a copy of the NOT to find out the attorney service handling the sale.

 

After a week or so, I followed up and not surprisingly, she got nothing from this agent.  Nothing in writing.  Not a copy of the NOT; not a rejection of the short sale letter from the lender; not a copy of the short sale package that was submitted on her behalf; not even a cancellation of the listing agreement; nothing.  Only words.

 

I wanted to help her, but with no documentation and only verbal statements, I could not commit myself to help her out of her predicament.  Given her particular situation, I seriously doubt anyone could help her with no documentation of what had happened before and being asked to step in only with the verbal understanding that foreclosure is imminent.

 

How could this individual have avoided this type of crisis?  I’m not going to go into allegations here without seeing any documentation, but it seems like the agent who professed to be a specialist perhaps was not so experienced.

 

I believe she did not have to be in this situation.  The best way to have avoided this crisis, in my opinion, was for her to have done her due diligence when hiring someone to help her out initially.   You really do not get a second chance when you are dealing with foreclosures.

First, she should have hired someone locally rather than someone who is 500 miles away to market and sell her home.  From what was described to me, he really didn’t know the local market and did not price it correctly nor put in a lot of effort to get it marketed correctly.  If she were not getting answers, she could have dropped in on a local agent to demand answers in a more timely manner.

 

Secondly, she is a young computer literate woman; she should have done some research into who she was hiring.  After all, she found me online.  She should have Googled the person’s name and see what was said about the individual.  She may not have gotten everything she needed, but she would have discovered if someone were alleging bad service or worse.  People may not write nice things about you, but if they felt mistreated, they will let the world know, from my experience.

 

Please distressed homeowners, do your due diligence before hiring someone to help you.

 

For those of you who follow this blog, I thank you for reading.   I have come across an amazing free offer that I feel compelled to share with you. 50 Gigs of space in the cloud for life.   You may have heard about the 2 Gigs of free space from Dropbox or 5 Gigs of free space from Apple or Amazon, but www.box.net  beats them all by offering an amazing 50 Gigs of cloud storage.  That’s a $50 option from Amazon and $100 option from Apple. 

This is a limited time offer.  If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you can activate an account using iOS 5 and get 50 Gigs.  Even if you don’t know how you will use it now, it makes sense to grab the offer before it expires and then figure out how you will use it later.  It can be a photo album or a movie collection in the cloud.

I’ve been using it to backup my client files over the net and it works like a charm.   I can use iPad, my android smartphone and my laptop and have access to all of the same files.  If you are familiar with Dropbox, it is similar in concept, except obviously with 25x more capacity.  GRAB IT WHILE IT IS AVAILABLE.

 

You can read about it below.

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/231900862/box-net-one-ups-apple-icloud-with-50-gb-free-cloud-storage.htm?itc=refresh

 

 

Here is a perfect property for those seeking income generation. Please contact me if you are interested.

People in general and sellers specifically, want to know what my team does to get homes sold.  The perception out there is that as Real Estate Agents, we simply put the property on the MLS and hold open a couple of houses to get the houses sold. 

 

Well, that assessment could not be further from the truth.  There is a tremendous amount of prep-work that goes into properly getting a home prepared and market ready.  The last thing you do is simply throw something out into the MLS and hope and pray that it will sell.  That would absolutely be the last thing I do.  But here is what I do. 

 

The reality is that a home that shows well and sells quickly, takes weeks of preparation involving a team consisting of an army of people: handyman, painter, cleaners, hardwood re-finisher, professional stager, photographer, termite inspector, property inspector, roof inspector and an excellent Realtor who is an exceptional marketer .  A fantastic looking home does not happen by accident; it takes a tremendous amount of hard work.  Granted it is not possible to do this type of transformation on each listing, but we try to do as much as it is possible to achieve as close to perfect market ready condition as possible.

 

When the sellers are committed and take professional advice (rather than ignore them) and work in conjunction with my team and everything comes together, then something magical can happen.

 

This particular house below took about 3 weeks in total of preparations and it drew multiple offers after only two weeks on the market.  Those statistics are amazing when you consider that six other similarly sized properties in the neighborhood were already on the market between 60-210 days without having received offers when we came on.  All of them are still on the market after we moved into pending status. We are not the most updated property on the market; a majority of them had more modern kitchens and bathrooms compared to us.  Neither are we the cheapest property on the market; we are somewhere in the middle of the pack.  It wasn’t just one simple fix or another; it was the complete selling system at work.

 

We drew up a master plan and followed it to completion.  The transformation is not as gargantuan as it appears.  The biggest tasks were the refinishing of the hardwood in the living room, replacing of the linoleum in kitchen floor, a fresh coat of paint and professional staging; others things were minor tasks.  Then of course, there is the multi-genre marketing campaign to get to every buyer out there in the price point to be aware of this property. 

 

The end result speaks volumes: the house was completely transformed and market ready, resulting in a happy seller who will walk away with much more money in his pocket. Would the result have been the same, if we just threw the house on the market without a plan and prayed that it would sell?  I would venture to guess we would be listing number 7 waiting for an offer with the other listings in the neighborhood.  You be the judge. 

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