Be Smart in Purchasing a Short Sale
The recession has greatly affected the real estate business, thus it is a buyer's market for most areas.
Among the cheapest homes in the market nowadays are short sale homes.
Even if short sale homes are very affordable, you have to be careful and smart when buying them.
Remember that homes sold short can be very tedious to buy, thus it is important to know what to expect from a purchasing these homes.
If you have wanted for some time now to buy a home but is restricted by your budget, a short sale home could be a good investment as long as you are a wise buyer.
Learn how to buy one in order to benefit from it.
First, you have to understand what a short sale means.
This sale occurs when a lender agrees to receive an amount lower than what the homeowner owed to be able to pay his mortgage in full.
A homeowner cannot perform a short sale unless there is agreement by the lender.
When buying a home in this state, you must be prepared for a long wait because it could take from a few weeks to a few months before there is a feedback from the lender.
Some buyers wait up to six months or even more for a response and mostly, the answer is NO.
Not every home sold short is in foreclosure so not all sellers of short sale homes are desperate.
Additionally, sellers often unrealistically set the listing price with the hope that home buyers will jump on it immediately.
In a pre-approved short sale, the buyers wait is considerably shortened.
In general, when a buyer walks away, the document of the seller have been submitted to the lender and the lender may have been near to issuing the approval letter, the only documents missing is the offer of the new buyer and loan qualifications.
Whether you can wait for a short sale home to go to foreclosure and the deed transferred to the bank depends on whether the home has several offers.
If there is more than one buyer who submitted an offer, the most likely to win is the one who have the highest and most qualified offer.
If you are the only buyer and the bank has a negative reply or none at all, it might be to your best interest to wait for foreclosure.
Remember that even with multiple offers for the property, the bank could still reject them because none is high enough for them.
Do not get discouraged if a bank rejects your offer because there are hundreds of short sale properties you can still consider.
Later on, the bank will put it up fro sale an REO and as a bank-owned home.
If the price is reasonable, you can purchase it from the bank.
At this point, you can be sure to be able to close the transaction within a month or so and most probably at a much lower price.