Obama’s administration to roll out Standardized Real Estate Short Sale Plan For San Diego Homes
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times on December 13, 2009 we may see some help for short sales with a new streamlined process. The program would require lenders and services to use uniform documentation, pre-approved short-sale terms, and accelerated turnaround times.
A short sale involves a lender or investor agreeing to collect less than the balance owed on a mortgage debt out of the proceeds of a negotiated sale of the property. Often a short sale is the last alternative to foreclosure available to distressed homeowners and banks. Say you’ve lost your job and fallen behind on mortgage payments. With little or no income, you can’t qualify for a modification program.
In this situation — grim as it is — your best move may be to see whether your lender will accept a short sale. Though the idea sounds straightforward, in practice it is not. First, the bank needs to be convinced that a short sale would yield it more money at the bottom line than a foreclosure would.
This usually means you need to bring in a real estate agent who knows the ropes and can pull together the key information needed by the bank: recent comparables on closed sales, local market trends and the likely selling price of your house.
You’ll also need a buyer for the house — one who’ll pay a price acceptable to the bank and has financing to close the deal. If you happen to have a second mortgage or home equity credit line on the property, you’ll also need to negotiate how much that lender will receive from the sale proceeds.
That can be tricky. In depressed real estate markets, the second-lien lender may be holding a note that’s worthless in a foreclosure because plummeting property values have wiped out the collateral. Yet that same bank is in a pivotal position: It has the legal power to block the short sale by refusing to sign on to the deal.
Equally troublesome in short sales is the fact that banks, mortgage servicers and bond investors often have conflicting requirements for documentation and financial yields that can complicate and drag out the haggling for months.
Many San Diego real estate professionals believe that the 2010 market will continue to see up-side down Sellers and short sales will continue as an alternative to foreclosures. Hopefully this new plan will allow the process to actually work in getting approvals and letting the Banks avoid actual foreclosures.
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