Can a Short Sale Help When an Estate Needs to be Settled?

Hey there, I’m Shawn Polston with TucsonShortSale.com and Keller Williams. We are Tucson’s top short sale team. I wanted to talk to you today about a touchy subject involving short sales. One of the things that is an unfortunate stage of life is when someone passes away and they were the mortgage holder on the property, and now the property is getting transferred to the heirs and the property is upside down. The mortgage is far more than what is owed on the property. There is some incredible misinformation out there. Some people are finding themselves in that situation are being told to simply walk away from the property. One of the biggest things to accomplish in a short sale is that payments have something to do with it, but also hardships. We have absolutely no problem going to the lender and explaining to them what’s happened and the lender not quickly coming to the conclusion that yes this is a situation where we want to help these people.

The process is very similar it takes about a month or a month and a half sometimes two months to get the lender to go ahead and agree to the short sale. However, convincing them that it’s something they should do I have yet to run into any resistance with the lender in this case.

One of the biggest things to this is closing this up or closing up this estate, getting this done and behind you. One of the things I’ve seen happen is that you get the advice to simply walk away from the property and allow the lender to foreclose which is certainly is an option. Here’s the problem with that, I hear from lenders that they are taking an average of 12 to 15 months to foreclose on a property. So you need to keep that in mind and talk to your estate attorney and in most cases to close up that estate and have this done, that property is going to need to be disposed of. So how long could you possibly have this matter hanging out there before the estate is actually closed up?

Walking away from the property is certainly an option; the thing you have no control over is when the lender gets around to and decides to foreclose on the property. In a short sale we have much more control. We do have to submit it to the lender and the lender does have to approve it, but when it’s all said and done I can in most cases have that done within four to five months, typically from start to finish. I just wanted to get that out there to you, and if you find yourself in that situation, we’re very familiar with how these things work and how they work with the estate attorneys. In some cases we’ve actually been able to get the estate attorney fees included as part of the short sale and been able to help the estate financially by doing a short sale.

Again, I’m Shawn Polston with Tucson’s top short sale team and I know you have other questions. I’d really like the opportunity to speak with you, so please feel free to pick up the phone and give me a call. You can also fill out the short sale request form and I’ll be in touch soon.