Best Spring Clearwater Real Estate Sales Since 2006
Preventing a Foreclosure in Safety Harbor
| Table of Contents |
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| Statistics and Graphs |
| Helping a Deserving Mother and Wife Get Her Dream Home |
| Another Homeowner Saved from Foreclosure |
| Dealing with a Tough Negotiation |
I realize this is the second article about a home in Safety Harbor but since it is an important one I figured you wouldn’t mind.
I have a client who is in the military, as is her husband, and she found out last fall that she was going to be stationed in Kansas while her husband was going to have to remain here. They would have to maintain their home here and she would have to rent a home in Kansas for her and her 4 children and would at the same time have a pay cut.
They still owned their first home in Safety Harbor in addition to the one they were currently living in here and had been renting it out to cover their expenses related to that house, but they were running into problems with the renter and would not be able to afford to pay on that mortgage after she moved. So she contacted her lender and had begun the process for doing a short sale.
She had originally contacted another Realtor but did not get communication back from them in a timely manner, and sometimes not at all. A family friend has been in town last September and worked with me and asked if I worked with short sales and when she found out I had special training on this she gave my number to the homeowner here who became my client.
By the time you read this the closing will be done (or soon after) and the timeframe on this was not quite as fast as the other one I wrote about but that in part was due to the fact that this was a VA loan and in part because the first buyer cancelled after a few issues arose that he didn’t want to deal with.
We listed the house on December 4th, had it under contract on the 14th and I finally got the contract to the lender on 12/27 (there were some foul-ups in their system having to do with getting them the contract). The lender ordered the appraisal the first week of Jan and it took until the last week of Jan to get it through all the reviews (it was a VA appraiser since it was a VA backed loan).
During those weeks we were waiting on the appraisal we had to resolve an open permit issue, which did get handled just before the appraisal finished its full review process.
The appraisal came back on 1/29 and I was contacted on 1/31 by the negotiator from the lender. He informed me that the house appraised at $165,000 and the way it works on a VA short sale is that the VA sets a minimum net amount they have to receive in order to approve the short sale and that minimum net amount is approximately 85% of the appraised value.
I had listed the home for $150,000 and the buyer’s offer had been $135,000. Based on the appraisal and the VA formula, the purchase price would have to be $155,000 to meet the minimum net to the VA. The buyer agreed to raise their purchase price and we got a signed addendum about this completed by 2/5 and got the short sale approval letter from the lender the next day. So from the time the house was listed to the time we got the approval from the lender it was 64 days, from the point where we had a contract is was 54 days but from the point where I was able to get the contract to the lender it was only 41 days and that included the 3 weeks it took for the VA appraisal and review.
Unfortunately the buyer chose not to continue after finding out the air conditioner was 19 years old and on 2/14 informed us they were canceling.
But then we got an offer in on 2/17 and went to contract on 2/18 with a buyer who knew the price was not negotiable and knew about the age of the air conditioner and other issues that came up in the inspection. This was also a buyer who was getting financing and so time had to be allowed first to get another short sale approval letter for this buyer and then for the buyer’s financing.
Due to this particular lender’s system it took a week before I could get them the new contract but from that point it only took 9 days to get the new approval letter. I had told the buyer’s agent that it would be quick and was upset that it had to take that long when we had already just had it approved with the different buyer, but the buyer’s Realtor was still amazed that it got done that quickly.
Now we are past all the inspections, financing steps and the closing is in less than 20 hours. A lot more happened along the way than just what I wrote above (handling fights between the title company and buyer’s lender, getting the buyer’s lender to complete an action in time to get the short sale lender what they needed to allow us to close on time and getting yelled at for doing that, etc.) but in a few hours my client will no longer be burdened with a loan payment they can’t afford or be worried about what to do to prevent this from being a foreclosure.
From date listed to closing date: 125 days with first buyer cancelling after approval and inspections and second buyer having to get financing.