The following are the top ten reasons why real estate professionals avoid short sales:
1) Bankruptcy When a homeowner files for bankruptcy, it helps to stop a foreclosure process. A short sale can still be performed, but it requires an approval from the bankruptcy attorney to release the property so a short sale attempt can be made. This is just means extra work for a real estate professional and it may increase the time to close a short sale, but it can still be done.
2) Sellers Misleading When qualifying a homeowner for a short sale, the homeowner must be cooperative. Many homeowners start the process of a short sale yet to cancel the transaction midstream by deciding to walk away from the home or file bankruptcy. If you feel that a homeowner may not have true intentions of going through a short sale, you should walk away.
3) Multiple Lenders We have closed short sales with multiple lien holders. For example, we had one file that was in bankruptcy, had two mortgage lenders, and five separate tax liens. It was because of a cooperative homeowner, we were able to get the short sale closed.
4) Lack of Agent Knowledge Many real estate professionals have not done short sales and based on our experience it takes a dedicated resource handling short sales day in and day out to understand what it takes to get a short sale approved and closed. We provide all information to how a short sale needs to be properly processed for a high chance of approval and this is based on the hundreds of short sale files we have analyzed and closed.
5) Banks Taking too long to respond As in any business, building relationships is important when working with a lender who takes too long to review a short sale file. WHB Solutions has worked enough short sale deals with lenders that we have actually been asked to send future short sale files to the same negotiator because of our proven experience. Many real estate professionals don't do a high volume of short sales and are not able to establish any strong relationship with lenders.
6) Client Knowledge on consequences Many real estate professionals do not know how to explain to their clients the consequences of a short sale and do not push for the homeowner to seek professional help when looking at their best options. It is this fact that causes a homeowner to not even attempt a short sale or stop mid-stream in a short sale process.
7) Lack of Communication We have learned from the experience of multiple short sale transactions that communication has been a key factor to ensure the success of short sale transaction. Buyers were not updated with progress and end up looking for another home. Frequent touch points with the lender were not made and deals fell through because someone did not do their job and the property was sold at an auction. There are many reasons short sales fail due to lack of communication.
8) Consistency Every lender has a different timeline when processing short sales and many real estate professionals have experienced inconsistent results, which causes a low level of confidence when working with short sales. All of our short sale education materials teach best practices that we have used to close our short sales that have been proven to work, regardless of the lien holder.
9) Buyers Walking This is a major concern for any short sale transaction. Putting in hours of work, yet to have it fall apart because a buyer walks away from a deal is not a good feeling. That is why it is important to continue finding backup buyers and setting the right expectations with the current buyer.
10) Staffing/Resource Issues It is possible for a real estate professional to single handedly become a short sale expert. But it is our opinion that the best results occur when there is a team in place. Unless short sales are 100% of your sale pipeline, one resource cannot be used to make endless phone calls to a lender to get a single transaction closed. Our short sale training materials is formatted in such a way that a single resource can work through a single short sale transaction to closure. Being a member of our short sale community will also aid to the success of any short sale file.
