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Sunday, February 8, 2009

A foreclosure costs a lot of money and time delays

By Rem

You have probably heard the phrase "real estate short sale" and wondered what it meant. If you read the newspapers, or turn on the TV and the odds are high that you will come across stories about declining real estate market conditions and the increasing willingness of banks and other financial institutions to consider real estate short sales as an alternative to foreclosure. Real estate prices have dropped dramatically, and the sell time has risen as well.

It is not unfair to label the current real estate market one that is undergoing a market meltdown in many cases, and Detroit is one of those. It is because the market is so inhospitable that the need for short sale real estate has gone up so dramatically.

A real estate short sale happens when a bank lets a property be sold for less than the amount owed on it. In order for this to occur, two conditions must be met. Firstly: Market values are such that the property's sale price cannot cover the outstanding mortgage balance(s). An inability to make additional payments on the property is the second requirement.

As an example, suppose a property was purchased five years ago for 217,000 dollars with an adjustable rate mortgage. The owners decided two years later that they needed a second mortgage of 10,000 dollars, bringing their total to 227,000 dollars. Home owners typically have made only a negligible dent in the amount of money that has gone towards paying off their debt in five years. The house might also be in a part of the country where the market values have fallen to a low of 215,000 dollars and their interest rates have gone up from around seven percent to up around eleven percent. Add in the additional problem of one of the owners having lost their job, and you end up with a very likely real estate short sale scenario.

A foreclosure costs a lot of money and time delays that the bank may not want to waste, and thus, they might allow a short sale instead. It's better to accept a definite amount of money right away, so that the property can be off the bank's book, than to accept an unknown amount at a distant point in the future. This is generally how a real estate short sale works, though there are other complications that can arise from having owners and lenders not agreeing to the terms of the sale.

For owners going through a real estate short sale, the experience can be a dreadful one, but there are experiences which can be far worse. A foreclosure, for example, would be far worse to have on your credit report. These short sales can give the smart real estate investor a great buying opportunity.

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