Short Sales in South Florida
For Florida Short Sales, don’t forget to visit my Short Sale Video Blog Site for information on selling your home as a Short Sale. Read on…
Sell your home in Coral Springs and South Florida as a Short Sale – what matters?
What are some things that can determine the success of selling your home as a Short Sale here in Coral Springs and other South Florida cities? As a Coral Springs Short Sale Realtor and South Florida Short Sale Realtor, I can help you with foreclosure options.
Let’s look at your story.
What has happened to your life that has made keeping up with your mortgage payments tough? Are you really having a hard time making ends meet, is it beyond the point of having a hard time and you just don’t have the money or do you simply not see the value of your home increasing any time soon? How you answer that question can determine the success you’ll have at selling your home as a Short Sale.
The greater the hardship, the greater likelihood that your Short Sale will be approved without having to worry about contributing to the Short Sale.
The non-existing hardship or minimal hardship, the greater likelihood of your Lender wanting you to contribute to the loss. This doesn’t mean they’ll want the entire deficiency balance taken care of or it’s not a definite yet it’s best that you know it might be the case. Of course, our goal is to always have you contribute no monies and be relieved of the entire deficiency. Lenders look at each borrower uniquely as nothing is cast in stone.
Let’s look at your home.
Selling a home as a Short Sale here in South Florida does not mean that your home has to be presented poorly. It’s just as important to present your home in a favorable light to potential Buyers as if you were selling a home in the traditional manner. Yes, it can make a difference.
If you don’t have the money for updating, that’s understandable if you have a great financial hardship. However, you can get your home sparkling clean and a sparkling clean home can win out over a dirty and messy updated home. Buyers will think that your home has been maintained well and updating can always come later. So keep in clean!
This leads to photographs of your home. You want photographs of high quality and a lot of them particularly when you’ve gone to all the effort of keeping your home clean. Put simply; Buyers look for homes online and if your home does not have many high quality photos, they’ll skip over your home. Most Buyers will not take a chance to go and actually visit a home if they haven’t seen photos online. So make sure you got photos!
Let’s look at what I, as a Short Sale Specialist
Once your home is a listed for sale as a Short Sale we will quickly look to secure a Buyer’s offer. Once a Buyer’s offer is secured, I will prepare a complete Short Sale package that will be submitted to your Lender(s) for review and ultimate approval. This package will include my market analysis of your home, all of your financials, the executed contract between you and Buyer and an estimated Settlement statement (HUD). If there are any other mortgages, past due association fees, code violations, etc., on your home and they’re not on the HUD, then your Lender can not approve them to be paid. However, these obligations must be paid in order to close and it’s best that the Lender is aware of them at the onset so your Short Sale approval is not delayed or declined due to these overlooked obligations. So get it right the first time around so the Lender(s) will agree to pay all! I will then begin to negotiate towards gaining Short Sale approval which I’ve had great success at with a closing ratio of around 98%. This can only be achieved through strong negotiation skills, persistence, determination and simply not taking “No” for answer.
Let’s look at what price you should accept to sell your home.
Far too often the falsehood is out there that it doesn’t matter what a Short Sale sells for – they’re wrong, as it does matter.
As a Short Sale Seller, you want the highest dollar amount for your home based on fair market value as you’re trying to cover a mortgage balance with the least amount of a deficiency. If you accept a Buyers low offer that is out of fair market value range than the likelihood of your Lender accepting the offer isn’t great. Increase the likelihood with a fair offer. The Listing Agent can determine “fair”. Keep in mind, when a low offer is submitted to your Lender and they decline the Buyer’s offer you’ve now wasted many months and the Buyer is either not loan approved to increase their offering price to your Lender’s demands or they won’t increase their offering price than you’re back to starting all over to find a new Buyer and even more months of not paying your mortgage have added to the balance owed – how does that make sense? It doesn’t.
Let’s look at your obligations as liens against your home.
As mentioned above, it’s critical that your financial obligations/liens are made known to your Short Sale Realtor if you want a successful Short Sale closing.
Don’t think that if you don’t mention an obligation that it won’t be found; it will be and you don’t want it to be found just before closing, as that will throw the train off it’s track.
Let’s look at you when you need to move out of your home.
This always comes up as a big concern with Sellers that I’ve represented through listing their home as a Short Sale. They think they’re going to be just thrown out of their home with no notice. This is not the case.
Typically, a Short Sale review, once you receive a Buyers offer takes several months but let’s say we’re fortunate and it takes only 30 days to gain a Short Sale approval from your Lender. Once you have received a written approval letter from your Lender, you’ll have typically at least 30 days to get moved out; this is the norm. So don’t worry you’ll have time.
Let’s look at any other concerns or questions you may have.
I’ve been representing Short Sale Sellers for many years now, in fact since 2008, and would look forward to answering your questions. Just let me know.
For more information on Short Sales, click on “Short Sales” and also visit: MyShortSaleHome.com
Lynn Pineda, your South Florida Keller Williams Short Sale Specialist