September, 2009:

Q: You said earlier that less than 20% of the short sales get approved. With those odds, why would anyone try?

Sep 28th, 2009
by edsmith.
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 A: Although the national averages look gloomy, there is hope if you want to sell or buy a short sale. Many knowledgeable agents around the nation have much higher than average success rates.

Our personal short sale success rate now stands at more than 95%. As more agents become proficient with short sales, we believe that the national averages will improve as well.

On the other hand, consider how much smoother the process would be if the 80% that will never be approved were never submitted. The entire process would be much more streamlined and efficient.

 

Short Sale Mania

Sep 4th, 2009
by edsmith.
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So, you think you want to buy a short sale?
 
Roughly 65% of all pending sales in our market fall into one or more distressed property catagories. That could be a short sale, pre-foreclosure, bank owned, etc.
 
The number of these pending sales equates to about twice the number of actual monthly closings. We are now learning that on a national basis, less than 20% of all submitted short sales are approved and actually close. Additionally, the process is becoming so protracted that many of the short sale buyers give up long before they get a response back from the foreclosing lender. With less than 20% of the short sale contracts being approved on a national basis, the odds of success are slim at best.    
 
So why do more than 80% of the short sales fail to close? Inexperience on the part of the real estate agents, period. The majority of short sale offers are so far below the lender’s minimum threshhold that the offers will never see the light of day. All these lowball offers only serve to bog down an already overwhelmed system.
 
So what to do?
 
Finding an experienced, qualified short sale agent should be your top priority. That is the single biggest factor in determining whether or not your transaction will be successful. Remember that for most real estate agents, the short sale business is a very recent phenomenon.  However, some of us have been orchestrating short sales for years. 
 
We know how to structure the short sale proposals. We know what the parameters are and what the lender will likely accept.  At 96%, our short sale success rate over the past three years far exceeds that of the national average.  There is no substitute for experience.