There are many properties in some stage of foreclosure or taken back by lenders at this time and a lot of buyers ask about these because they’ve heard that this is where you can get an incredible deal امکانات پروژه زاگرس منطقه 22.
During the boom years there were tons of seminars and books on how to make a fortune in real estate by buying and flipping houses. Though some people were able to make good money quickly that way during the period of about 2003 to mid-2005,
many others are now part of the foreclosure statistics.
Similarly, there are now lots of websites, seminars, books, etc. on how to make your fortune buying foreclosure properties. They present stories of exceptionally good situations that make it sound like this is how every foreclosure situation goes even though it is really more of a rare occurrence for the average person.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good deals available in properties that are in some stage of foreclosure, there are. BUT – there are some things you’ll need to understand because the process can be quite different from the normal. First of all there are some different types of ‘foreclosure’ properties and I want to start off by clearing this up for you.
There is a ‘short sale’. This generally means a pre-foreclosure property where the property is being listed at a price that is less than what is owed on the outstanding loans. You can recognize these in listings as it will either say “short sale” or “3rd party approval needed” or “list price may not be sufficient to cover all encumbrances” (meaning that the bank will have to approve it in addition to the seller accepting the offer).
One word of caution though, some realtors will list a property as a short sale or “possible” short sale without even having their client complete a “short sale package” (the paperwork that will have to be submitted to the bank with any contract) – avoid these as in most cases they end up going nowhere or take months to hear anything back.
There are also “bank-owned” properties. Bank-owned means the bank has completed the foreclosure proceedings and now owns the property fully. These are usually the easiest and quickest of the different types of foreclosure properties to deal with although they are often (not always) in pretty bad condition.
The most difficult type of these to deal with at this point in time (in most cases) is a short sale. With a short sale, you will have to be prepared to wait weeks or even months to hear anything back on an offer. If your offer is at the asking price and 100% cash, then that may shorten the time period. But even in that situation there is no guarantee that it won’t take weeks or months.
As an example, I spoke with another realtor a few months ago whose client not only put in a full list price offer but also offered to pay for the title insurance that would normally be paid by the seller. It still took 3 weeks to get an answer and what came back from the bank was that they wouldn’t consider the offer until they had a special disclosure signed by the buyer that is required on houses built before 1978.
One other case is a realtor that listed a short sale and got a very low offer which she submitted to the bank in November (this was even after the house was listed for $200,000 less than the current owner paid for it 2 years ago). As of February she still hadn’t gotten a reply back from the bank. So that was 3 months with no reply.
Recently I had a client put in an offer on a short sale that just came back on the market after the lender rejected the offer that had been submitted to them nearly 6 months ago. The offer was lower than they wanted but they rejected even doing a short sale because the owner had been continuing to pay their monthly loan payment – and it took them 6 months to let the owner’s realtor know this.