The first thing I should mention is that you shouldn't let any lack of experience in this area hold you back or intimidate you. In the preceeding 10 year period of booming real estate valuations record-low interest rates, short sales just weren't as common as they will be in this era of tightening credit guidelines and major lenders collapsing like so many dominoes. Their was no incentive for a foreclosing bank to agree to a short sale if they could wait it out, take the house back and sell it to recoup their investment completely. Now, with mounting foreclosures and record-high delinquencies, banks are much more likely to want to cap their losses at a preset amount, and your short-sale offer gives them that out. You won't be the only one with limited experience in this area, but if you jump in and start learning now, you may set yourself up to be the in-house expert and go-to agent.

1. Familiarize yourself with lenders. Your local banks will be the ones most likely to have a foreclosure representative in your area that you can go and speak to in person. They are also likely to be the easiest to work with and build relationships with. Likewise, some lenders, especially those with highly touted subprime "100%, One Loan, No MI", like Countrywide, may be ripe for the picking because of the structure of the loans they made, not their location. I can introduce you to key people at national lenders if you become a member of LinkedIn, the online professional network, or Jigsaw, the business card sharing network.

2. Conduct a Foreclosure/Short Sale Seminar with a knowledgeable Realtor. Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach; helping another agent prepare for and put on a seminar is probably one of the best ways to put this into practice. Offer your PowerPoint presentation or online marketing expertise in return for knowledge in the mechanics of getting these deals done, and you will both likely wind up with more business. Since short sales are so difficult and time consuming to complete, you will likely not encounter any difficulty in agreeing to share any leads; one or two deals will likely keep you as occupied as you want for the coming weeks.

3. Prepare a newsletter on the subject. Putting your ideas and knowledge in written form vastly increases their potency; prepare a short question and answer sequence that you can print out in brochure or newsletter form. You can then it convert to email, online, and other language versions as well. (I'd be more than happy to help anyone who would like one translated into a Spanish version, by the way, as long as you own the copyright:)

4. Institutionalize your knowledge. Other agents in your office or your network will be likely going through the same process, albeit with different lenders. One of the best ways to share this knowledge is through a wiki, where everyone can access and edit pages about their experience. Wikipedia has grown into a world-class reservour of knowledge by using this method; it's a picture-perfect example of harnessing the intellectual power of groups. In that same vein, there are some great ActiveRain blog posts; John Occhi, David Petrovich, Kristal Kraft, and Damion Flynn, to name a few, have written particularly informative and detailed pieces on short sales.

5. Get your name out there. In today's Denver Post, there's a short article about a local Realtor Jackie Garcia offering a short sale on the front page of the Real Estate section. It's an almost perfect marketing piece. Besides being virtually free, it offers a short introduction to short sales, the listing and its location (a high-end gated community), sets up tremendous value proposition with a comparison of the surrounding homes sale prices, and it instills a sense of urgency by playing up the impending foreclosure angle. I'm sure that in addition to inquires about the house for sale, she'll receive inquiries from people in foreclosure wanting her to list their homes in the same way.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or would like to share your experience in this area, either in the comments, at jose.loan@gmail.com, or if you'd like to give me a ring at 719-360-2397. Also, I'd like to add, almost as a disclaimer, that I'm hardly the doom-and-gloom type; to the contrary, you can see my upbeat assessment of this year's potential and my discounting of the "Massive Foreclosures" headlines in my early blog posts. I had a subprime lender's employee contact me after my "50+ Lenders Floundering" post and tell me that other bloggers covering the meltdown and myself should quit piling on his employer as he (or she) didn't want to lose their job. That's the last thing I want; after all, as a mortgage broker, I work for/with lenders as well: they are the ones that cut my paychecks. Cascades of tighter lending guidelines and lenders' collapses make my job much harder, but I'm trying to look for opportunites in this new landscape instead of burying my head in the sand and pretending that it hasn't changed. The glass is half full over here! Anyone want a drink?
Cheers,
Jose