I've been working on a particular short sale for about 9 months. The house is all brick, has a big yard, and is in a good neighborhood. It should be an easy sale, but that hasn't been the case. When I first took the listing, the owner lived there and it looked pretty good, inside and out. It's been vacant with the power off for over 6 months and now looks distressed. The owner took out her furniture and did some cleaning, but there are garbage bags full of trash in the driveway and misc. junk left in several rooms. The carpets are filthy and a professional cleaning would work wonders.
The house is listed at $130K, which seems to be a fair price based on condition of the property and comps. The bank's appraisal came in at $148K and was based on comps that had sold almost a year earlier (not much activity since) and were in excellent condition when they sold. There have been lots of showings and several offers, some of them very close to the listing price, all turned down by the bank who held out for $148K.
After months of submitting evidence indicating that the bank's expectations were too high, they finally approved the last offer, four months after it was submitted, but now the buyer is in a tight monetary position and needs the extra cash for a family emergency and can't afford to fix the house up, so they walked. It's been shown several times in the last month, but everyone is turned off by what appears to be too much work.
Dropping the price to compensate for the condition isn't a viable option, so it appears that the best bet is to get it cleaned up. The seller doesn't have money to hire it out and I think that I need to try to convince her to do the work that's needed if she wants to get it sold and avoid foreclosure.
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