Realty help needed...know anything about short sales??

[mommyrachael]

Not sure if this is the right section, but here goes.
We made an offer on a property out in the country 2 weeks ago. The realtor told us it was a short sale, and that it could take a lot of time. He recommended that we get our house listed so that if/when we got a response to our offer, we'd be ready, and we could make any offers on our house subject to closing on this place.
So, we listed a week ago, got an offer today. DH called the short sale place realtor to see if he'd heard anything or could contact the seller at all to let them know we've got an offer to see if it would help speed things up even a little. He said he hadn't even presented our offer yet....that he had someone working on where to send it.

WHAT?????

Is this normal, customary business that it would take over 2 weeks just to get the offer sent somewhere?? Granted, I'm not a real estate agent, so maybe there's lots I don't understand about this, but I sort of feel like maybe we're getting the run-around...

Any thoughts? Feel free to set me straight on this

thanks...

[SubliminalDarkness]

Short sales take months. When we bought our house in 2008, we didn't even look at short sales because we couldn't handle the timetable.

[PenelopeJune]

Yeah, short sales are the worst. We are doing a short sale on our house. The offer was made at the tale end of November. The bank just TODAY said they would take the offer...but now the whole thing has to go through the second mortgage holder to see if THEY will take it.

And it's possible that the realtor is having a hard time tracking down who holds the mortgage, and who they need to send the offer to. If the homeowner hasn't filled out some paperwork about a short sale/loan help, there won't even be a contact person yet. Then once they FINALLY track down a contact person, then they have to mess around with all kinds of stupid stuff, and if the homeowner isn't totally on the ball it will drag things out for ages.

I've been totally on top of things, sending in papers and info as SOON as the bank needed it...and it still took two months just to get 1/2 an approval.

When we purchased our first home, it was a bank-owned property. From the time we made the offer until the time we closed, it was 6 months. And that was a much more straight-forward deal.

Good luck. I hope things go smoothly with your offer!

[zebra15]

Originally Posted by mommyrachael

Not sure if this is the right section, but here goes.
We made an offer on a property out in the country 2 weeks ago. The realtor told us it was a short sale, and that it could take a lot of time. He recommended that we get our house listed so that if/when we got a response to our offer, we'd be ready, and we could make any offers on our house subject to closing on this place.
So, we listed a week ago, got an offer today. DH called the short sale place realtor to see if he'd heard anything or could contact the seller at all to let them know we've got an offer to see if it would help speed things up even a little. He said he hadn't even presented our offer yet....that he had someone working on where to send it.

WHAT?????

Is this normal, customary business that it would take over 2 weeks just to get the offer sent somewhere?? Granted, I'm not a real estate agent, so maybe there's lots I don't understand about this, but I sort of feel like maybe we're getting the run-around...

Any thoughts? Feel free to set me straight on this

thanks...

Yes , short sales can take MONTHS and MONTHS and then your offer may not even be accepted. My question is do you have a relator working with you or just the seller? With a short sale I would want a buyers agent as well, but none the less SS do take FOREVER.

[hildare]

oh MAN

we purchased our farm with a short sale.. it worked out rather well for us but it might not have!
we bid in early june and closed in OCTOBER. yup. and we sold the house we were living in in August.. luckily, the owner of the new house/farm was super nice and he let us rent under the table so we had a place to move our stuff to.. all while i was 7 months pregnant.
Anyway, it's worth it if you can wait.
Our mortgage broker told us you can tell that you'll probably get it approved if they send out an appraiser. They will not pay for an appraiser if all the other financial stuff is not in order, so at least you can have some idea that you'll get the property if that happens. My advice to you would be to do what we did, and get a real estate person involved.. they can put pressure of sorts onto the bank to hurry it up, that you may not be able to do yourself.

Also, it depends on what bank the seller's using.. ours was particularly horrible and only one guy for a huge amount of processing.
Good luck, I know that's a hard row to hoe!