Northern Virginia Short Sales: Should You Use Shorter Deadlines to Motivate the Banks to Get the Deal Done?
If you are a Seller in a Northern Virginia Short Sale, you might be inclined to stick it to your Short Sale Bank and put a clause in your Northern Virginia Short Sale Contract that can be used to "motivate" the bank to act quickly. After all, this is the same bank that probably was unresponsive and slow when processing your request for loan modification before you chose to go the route of Short Sale. Anything you can do to light a fire is bound to help, right? Maybe a strict one month time frame for approval?
Let me share with you from my experience as a Northern Virginia Short Sale Agent why this is NOT a good idea. Whatever time frame you put in your Northern Virginia Short Sale Contract for approval is also the amount of time you are expecting the Buyer to wait.
Typically, your Northern Virginia Short Sale Agent will be able to give you a fairly close estimate on how long your Short Sale will take to get approved. It may be 30 days or 90 days. Whatever estimate you are given by your Short Sale Agent, that's reality. That is the amount of time you want to make sure your Buyer is committed to. Shortening an approval time frame to 30 days when 60 is needed is asking for a Buyer that will find another property and bail on you before getting approval.
The date you set in the Northern Virginia Short Sale Contract for approval really should be there to set a realistic expectation for the Buyer. Setting unrealistic expectations in the hopes of motivating a bank is a bad way to start with the bank.
If you want to speed up getting your Short Sale Approval, the best idea is to cooperate with your Northern Virginia Short Sale Agent in getting your financial documentation together for the bank. That helps speed up the process more than anything. Getting a complete Short Sale contract package to the bank helps immensely. Leave the time frames in the contract as a guide to the Buyer with the idea that you will overestimate and deliver early. That way, you are far more likely to get to settlement than to end up fighting with your Short Sale Bank and losing buyer after buyer with what amount to empty threats to the Short Sale Bank. In the end, you are only hurting your chances at getting to the settlement table. You're not hurting the Short Sale Bank.
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