"It was a gorgeous property on the corner lot," Ellis told the Huffington Post. The owner, who had lost his job, wanted to sell the apartment for a loss rather than go into foreclosure, a strategy known as a short sale.
The offer was for $350,000, and Ellis, who is a certified distressed property expert trained in executing such sales, knew it was as good an offer as he was going to get in this market. He immediately sent the paperwork into the bank.
He waited for four months. The bank finally told him it wouldn"t take anything less than $400,000 -- a price Ellis was sure he could never get. In September, the buyer"s agent called to say, "You know what, we gotta move on, we gotta buy something else."
Now the property is sitting vacant as it slides into foreclosure. Its former owner"s credit is destroyed, and the house is losing value every day. "God knows what the condition is today," Ellis said, adding he"d be surprised if the property is worth more than $290,000 when it resurfaces on the market. Add in the legal expenses involved in a foreclosure, and the bank cost itself a hundred thousand dollars more that it otherwise would have. It"s a scenario that plays out constantly, everywhere in the United States. In a time of collapsing real estate values, where one in five homes are now under water, a short sale is increasingly the only option before foreclosure. It is less damaging to credit scores and spares the homeowner the shame of foreclosure.
It is also a better option for banks: According to one analysis, short sales resulted in loan losses of only 19 percent, compared with an average loss of 40 percent on homes sold after foreclosure.
So why aren"t these sales more widely used?
The broad answer is that the American financial system simply can"t handle a collapse of this magnitude. The fates of the banking and real estate industries are intertwined. But they don"t work together -- and the result is that they end up working against each other. LinkHere
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