A short sale is when a lender accepts a discount on a mortgage to avoid a possible foreclosure auction or bankruptcy. For example: A homeowner, who is facing foreclosure, has an existing first mortgage of $300,000. The market value of the home is $210,000.
To make a long story short, the lender accepts the offer for $210,000 and the home is sold.
That‘s a short sale. As you can see from the graph on the right, the explosion of foreclosures is not something isolated in Tallahassee. Even though a third of our housing market consists of distressed properties, Tallahassee is below the average for Florida and the rest of the US housing market. This problem is not going to go away any time soon.
Lenders Embrace Short Sale
You might wonder why lenders are so eager to take such a huge discount, so you have to consider the nature of the banking business. Banks do not like bad loans. If they see an opportunity where they can sell a home through a short sale without the huge loss of a foreclosure, they will do it. Some lenders report that if the home goes into foreclosure by the time the home actually closes with the new buyer the lender will be lucky to have netted 50% of the original loan balance.
What‘s the bottom line from the lenders perspective? They are in the business of lending money, not owning homes. If they can accept a short sale offer and rid themselves of the bad loan AND net more versus the home going into foreclosure…they will do it every time. It‘s simply smart business for them.
This is even more valid now that the writing is on the wall. The foreclosure crisis has reached epidemic proportions. Every day there‘s a new report about the sheer numbers of shadow inventory, or homes that have been foreclosed on but haven‘t gotten back on the market yet. There are millions of homes already in the shadow inventory pipeline. Banks are not anxious to increase those numbers any more than they have to.
Introducing A New Book Explaining A Short Sale
As the leader in short sales, we get questions all the time about how they are used to sell a home. Four years ago, short sale questions came from people who were behind in their mortgages and wanted to know how selling short could help them avoid foreclosure and its long impact on their credit ratings. But times have changed.
People with excellent credit and who are current on their mortgages are faced with staggering losses when they try to sell a home they purchased or refinanced in the past 6 years. These people are now understanding the benefits of short selling their homes.
We offer this free e-book to explain the short sale process to everybody who owns a home and wants to know more about all of their options. With over 86 pages of information on nearly every short sale question that I have ever received, it is a valuable resource for homeowners.
The book includes information about the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) as well as the loss mitigation phone numbers for most lenders in the United States. Finally, we offer a complete State-by-State guidance for our readers who are not necessarily located in the state of Florida.
Get your free copy of the book and find out if a short sale is an option that you should consider now or sometime in the near future.
You May Also Be Interested In...
Comments(4)