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FHA Short Sale Pre-Foreclosure Program Could Work For You

February 16, 2015

Today I wanted to talk to you about your FHA loan and a situation that some of you may be in. If you’re in a house with an FHA loan and need to sell but it’s not worth the amount of the loan, what are you going to do? FHA has been around for quite some time and they have a program called the FHA Pre-Foreclosure Sale Program.

There are a number of steps to successfully navigating that program, one of them being having difficulty making the payments and no longer needing the house. If you still live in that house they will review retention options for you, which is just another term for a loan modification. If they review you and aren’t willing to do the loan modification the next option becomes a short sale. If you do need to do a short sale, they’ll give you approval for the program, do an appraisal on your home; there are all mathematics that goes into what type of figure they’re willing to accept as a reasonable offer on the home. There are several nuances and complexities to this program.

I’m not telling you all of this to scare you aware from the FHA Pre-Foreclosure Sale Program; I’m actually telling you all of this to set myself apart from what you may hear in talking to another real estate agent. The process with FHA is near and dear to us because we do short sales with them on a regular basis. One of the other things is that they’re now allowing up to a $3000 incentive to the homeowner to complete a short sale instead of walking away from the property.

If you have an FHA loan and have stopped making payments or know the day is coming where you won’t be able to make payments, I’d love to talk to you about their program and the benefits of it. We can see if it will work for you and your situation.

Hiring The Right Agent For Your Short Sale

February 9, 2015

Today I wanted to discuss what I feel the most important thing to look for in a real estate when it comes to completing a short sale. Its experience and success with the transactions. I was actually an investor in the first short sale I was involved with; this is before I got into real estate. Since becoming a real estate agent in 2006 I’ve helped over 400 people with these types of transactions and we have an extremely high success rate compared to the national average. The homeowners that hire us and see the process through to the end, over 90% of those transactions close and the homeowner gets their short sale completed; the national average is 30%.

It isn’t just a question of whether or not they deal with a lot of short sales, it’s if they can actually get them to close. Realtor Magazine said recently that 43% of the real estate agents were going to close one or less transaction in 2014; the bottom 70% of real estate agents were only going to close ten transactions. My team and I typically handle over 100 transaction. I’d like to alert you to when you talk to a real estate agent about short sales and they say they deal with a lot of them, make sure you have that agent quantify that for you. They may only be handling a handful of transactions a year, so one short sale may be a lot when compared to their other transactions. In reality when compared to someone like me, where I handle over 80 transactions in a 12 month period, knowing the most recent trends for lenders, knowing the policy guidelines from the different investors is a benefit to you knowing that you’ll get the best possible outcome or the highest chance of success with your short sale.

The takeaway is that when talking to real estate agents about short sales have them quantify to you what their production is; it doesn’t hurt to even have them show you their production on the MLS. Pick up the phone and give us a call or fill out the short sale request form if there’s anything else we can do for you.

Is A Deed In Lieu Of Foreclosure Right For You?

February 2, 2015

What is a deed in lieu of foreclosure? A deed in lieu of foreclosure is basically when you sell the house back to the person that owns the mortgage; it’s an alternative to them foreclosing on the house. One of the things about a deed in lieu of foreclosure is that it is a fairly complicated process with the lender. THere’s a lot of paperwork shuffling back and forth and staying on top of the lender to keep the transaction moving along. In a lot of cases I find that when someone is looking into a deed in lieu of foreclosure they find all the hoops they have to jump through and they ultimately just walk away from the property and let the bank foreclose on the home. There are all kinds of reasons for not doing this, such as your HOA dues coming back to haunt you, your insurance company cancelling your homeowners insurance and someone gets hurt on your property. It’s simply not a good idea to do this.

If you’re looking at the deed in lieu of foreclosure process and have more questions or have decided to just walk away from your home, I’d like to ask you to at least give us a call because I’d love to talk to you about it with no obligation. We can see if the deed in lieu of foreclosure or just walking away from the home makes sense when compared to completing a short sale. One of the services my team offers don’t actually end up costing you anything because the lender pays our fees; we handle all of the short sale transaction for you. If you’re ready to move on from the property, walking away from it versus completing a short sale might not be in your best interest so please get in touch with us to discuss your options before you make your final decision.

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About Shawn Polston

Shawn has been a Realtor since 2006. Prior to becoming an agent Shawn and his wife were active real estate investors. Shawn takes his education seriously; he’s taken over 200 hours of continuing education classes, to keep up-to-date on current laws and trends. Shawn is a member of the Arizona Association of Realtors Master of Real Estate Society and a Graduate of the Realtor Institute. He is also a HAFA certified Short Sales and Foreclosure Specialist in addition to being a National Association of Realtors Short Sale and Foreclosure Resource.

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