Handling Menifee CA Short Sales

As an update to my Halloween post, I am off to my 3rd short sale appointment in Menifee in the last 3 days.  What makes this situation so tough is that not only is the ability to sell the homes severely restricted by the banks and their processing time.  But actually sharing painful information with the client is not a joy either.

For example, this home I am visiting today is in Menifee Lakes.  It is right around the standard 3 bed, 2 bath 1500 square foot home.  There are 39 competing properties in the 4 map codes of the community.  What is worse, is many of the properties are fully banked owned or still in the hands of the owner who has enough equity.  And the average price is the mid-200s! This market is in free fall.

So, no I have to convince 4 parties on what it will take to sell this house: current owner in distress, the future buyer, bank #1, bank #2.

Since a short sale is the least desirable for other agents to show (banked owned, or traditional both much better), I will need to convince the owner to make the price aggressive to say the least.  Meanwhile with this many competing properties, the floor will continue to go down.  Can you imagine people buying in Menifee Lakes, a once premier community for $190,000 -$220,000?  That is just a scary price drop!

Menifee in particular is suffering badly right now due to an incredible over-supply of homes on the market.  There are over 500+ homes on the market in the area and unfortunately I see rougher times ahead.  The same is true for Murrieta (although Murrieta is much larger than Menifee and offers more services, etc.)

So, this interview should be interesting as I will be doing this potential client a favor but using a twelve-gauge shotgun of logic and showing him the market.  But I can't imagine it will make for a fun meeting in anyway.  However, our market is changing.  Lately, I have been hearing that agents are charging people upfront 1% or flat fees just to take on a short sale.  Anyone else seeing that?

I am writing this so people can see the activity of the short sale and also realize that while you can try to avoid showing them to clients, your clients will find them anyway.  So if you don't know how to deal with short sales, get cracking!