Posts with tag Short Sales

The perfect-storm buying conditions of today don't end with record low interest rates and severely depressed home prices: The housing meltdown has also caused a bargain-friendly type of home sale to flourish, injecting the market with even more potential for great deals. No, we're not talking about foreclosures: We're... Continue Reading »

LOS ANGELES -- Foreclosures made up a smaller slice of all U.S. homes sold in last year's third quarter, as banks delayed placing properties for sale and home sales slowed. Despite the decline, foreclosures still represented 20 percent of all homes sold in the July-September period -- about four times more than at the... Continue Reading »

Think the high-end of the market hasn't been felled by the economic downturn? Guess again. Here's a lovely four-bedroom contemporary home in Malibu, Calif., that is now being offered as a short sale with a recent price drop of $1 million. Ouch. The 5,000-square-foot home is now listed at $2.85 million, subject to the... Continue Reading »

Oddly, the best way to deal with being upside down on your home mortgage may be to just go out and buy a second house. As housing values spiral down and people increasingly owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, many start to look longingly at a different house -- perhaps something smaller and cheaper and... Continue Reading »

It's not mortgage principal reduction, but it's a start. Bank of America is quietly rolling out an incentive program in parts of Florida in which they'll pay distressed homeowners up to $20,000 if they successfully short-sell their home, according to The Palm Beach Post. A short sale is an arrangement in which the lender... Continue Reading »

Wherever there is a crisis, there will be a line of unscrupulous people poised to take advantage of it. The housing crisis is no exception. According to CoreLogic, fraud occurs in one in every 53 short sales. And sometimes, it's not the homeowner but the lender who is targeted in the scam. While hearing that lenders have... Continue Reading »

The sides in the housing crisis' morality play have been very neatly defined for us. The banks are the ruthless, faceless devils who cast out the sick and (financially) weak from their homes. A few bystanders -- let's call them renters-by-choice and anonymous online commenters -- stand on the sidelines cheering because,... Continue Reading »

Mortgage servicers contending with attorney general investigations and extended foreclosure delays turned more to short sales in the past year. In August 2009, short sales accounted for 8% of all liquidations of distressed properties. That number grew to 25% by the middle of 2011, according to research from Moody's... Continue Reading »

For anyone who has braved the housing market in the past four years, short sales have become synonymous with high risk and high reward. But with so many discounted properties on the market today, are they really worth a buyer's trouble? Maybe -- if you have a lot of time and a strong stomach. Yes, you can get a... Continue Reading »

Almost a third of the escrows that open today fall apart, a disheartening fact for buyers, sellers and agents -- but mostly sellers, who often have been waiting a good long while for a viable buyer to come down the pike. The good news is that we know why deals are imploding and have some solutions: Continue Reading »

Video Transcript Perhaps you've been hearing a lot about short sales these days. It's no wonder -- the number of short sales on the market has exploded in recent months, as more and more homeowners turn to short sales as a means of avoiding foreclosure. Some homebuyers seek out short sales in hopes of snagging... Continue Reading »

NEW YORK -- Just as the housing market began to collapse near the end of 2007, a real estate agent in Bridgeport, Conn., asked Regions Bank if it would accept a $102,375 bid on a home that was underwater on its mortgage. Under the impression that this was the best offer on the home, Regions agreed to the short sale and... Continue Reading »

In the pecking order of risky real estate transactions, homebuyers are usually most wary of short sales, which are notoriously more complicated than foreclosures. But with some key revisions to the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program in April, short sales could suddenly become more accessible to both... Continue Reading »

The do-it-yourself video phenomenon that swept the Internet with its hilarious, obscenity- laden iPhone parody is at it again. But this time, those curmudgeonly puppies are taking aim at the real estate market. Xtranormal, a popular online video-making platform that turns user-generated text into animated films, has... Continue Reading »

When the foreclosure guru founder of Foreclosures.com fell behind in her mortgage payments and found herself to be hurtling down the road toward foreclosure, she did what any American would: She weighed her alternatives. "I am like any other person [facing] something most of America has gone through or is going through as... Continue Reading »