Special offer

When Your Massachusetts HAFA Short Sale Doesn’t Work!

By
Services for Real Estate Pros with Short Sale Mitigation, LLC

Ugg…Another HAFA nightmare I encountered today. I’ve heard NOTHING , but negative news on HAFA. Every Realtor I’ve spoken with who is dealing with a HAFA short sale are not impressed. I’m sure you all read at this point that only 342 short sales and deed-in-lieu’s been completed have been approved and sold since HAFA’s inception last April-September. http://www.housingwire.com/2010/10/27/market-questions-sigtarp-numbers-on-treasurys-hafa-program - What I’d like to know out of that number is how many deed-in-lieu’s were performed for homeowners hopeful for a short sale.

Never would I claim to know all about short sales as the business is ever changing. I would caution you to run from someone who claimed they DID know everything as it is almost impossible. I am writing this today because I encountered a phone call from a homeowner today who asked me to buy his home.

Now Rapid Property Relief, LLC solely focuses on pre-foreclosure acquisition and negotiation so of course anytime a homeowner calls and asks me to buy their home in Massachusetts, it’s a win win for everyone. The problem with this particular short sale is the homeowner was enrolled in the HAFA program. We don’t actually purchase HAFA short sales as there is a lot to the program we don’t agree with, but the homeowner asked if he were to opt out of the HAFA program would we consider buying his property?

So there it was. That was the question I had to consider and didn’t know the answer too. The home was a condex, and typically we don’t purchase condos, but we will consider a condex if there are no condo fees and if more than 50% of the units are owner occupied, so his condex passed that one qualifier we had.

My next phone call was to his Realtor to introduce myself. I explained the homeowner wanted us to buy his property and what we did and how we did it. She was very open and genuinely wanted to work with us, but she started going over the timeframe for the short sale and some things didn’t add up.

HAFA allows you to sell your home for 120 days from the time they mail you the application. If you don’t sell in that timeframe, then they CAN exercise their right to perform the deed in lieu. This homeowner happened to just be a couple days past that mark. The homeowner had called and opted out of the program, however, now I was stumped. Would the lender allow us to do a traditional short sale after this expiration of the HAFA short sale?

To be honest, it’s too much effort to try for a short sale when at any given moment the lender can say NOPE, the property belongs to us now so it was important to find out if that would or could actually occur. No one wants to go into a short sale, knowing at any moment it would end because the lender took the home back. At least with a foreclosure, you know what deadline you are up against.

So I posed the question to the Realtor…Would the lender exercise their right to a deed in lieu if a traditional short sale was started? So at this moment I await the answer. When I find out, I will post back.

Maryann Little, Owner Rapid Property Relief, LLC
Preforeclosure acquisition and negotiation Massachusetts and New

Hampshire Short Sales Massachusetts – Short Sales New Hampshire

Comments (2)

Bruce & Sandy Soli
Sierra Sotheby's International Realty - Incline Village, NV
Tahoe Lifestyle Experts

Get this.  Our seller was chugging along with the short sale with BoA and then all of a sudden they changed it to a HAFA short sale and he is not elidgible for this.  I had to get them to cancel the HAFA so that we could proceed and then they canceled it and we had to start over.  What a nightmare.  BoA get it together!

Dec 04, 2010 07:28 AM
Maryann Little
Short Sale Mitigation, LLC - Methuen, MA
Short Sales Massachusetts

That doesn't surprise me in the least.  I've heard some crazy things

Dec 04, 2010 04:15 PM