Watch this informative loan modification video and learn how you can get your bank to give you a loan modification. While many people who do seek to get a loan modification are denied, a lot of people are successful getting their loan balance reduced, interest rate lowered, the loan recast, get a forbearance agreement, and […]
California Distressed Home Owner Information
Do you own a home, but owe more on it than it's worth? Are you behind in your mortgage payments - or maybe you're at risk of falling behind? A lot of home owners in California are in this same situation - or have been, or will be! No matter the real estate market cycle or the state of the economy, home owners can find themselves in a situation where making another mortgage payment can seem impossible. Many home owners in this situation worry about foreclosure, but in fact few distressed owners in California actually end up getting foreclosed upon. There are many other routes, including loan modification, a short sale, and others. SellForSure.com features a number of articles that will be of interested to distressed home owners in California.
The California Short Sale Guidebook
Are you under water on your mortgage, behind on your mortgage payments, or both? If so, you’re not alone; many people have been and are in that same situation today. For millions of home owners over the past years, the ultimate solution to this predicament has been to pursue a short sale. A short sale […]
A Homeowner’s Guide to Foreclosure in California
The California Department of Real Estate (now the Bureau of Real Estate) put out a guide to foreclosure for California homeowners in 2010. It’s about 70 pages long, and contains a wealth of information for anyone facing foreclosure in California. The guide includes information on a wide array of topics: Notice of Default (NOD) Notice […]
Transition Assistance for Distressed Homeowners
This morning I received an email from Bank of America that there is still Transition Assistance for Distressed Homeowners in California. Not all homeowners will qualify, but for those who do, it can be a real blessing. Here’s the email: Distressed California Homeowners May Qualify for California’s Keep Your Home California Transition Assistance Program (TAP). […]
Tales of a Santa Cruz Short Sale
While you can get a good deal on a property by buying it as a short sale, I posit that you are not necessarily getting a “good deal” – you are probably getting a fair deal, given the state of the market. … The thing with short sales is, the lender gives short sale approval, with a close of escrow to be on-or-before a certain date – and they typically don’t give you very much time to close escrow once they have given you approval, as was the case here. To cut a long story short, we were ultimately able, by hook and by crook, to get the unit certified as “asbestos free” in time such that the lender could fund the loan and close escrow in time to stay within the time period permitted by the short sale approval letter. We had to kind of cheat here, actually – my client got the testing company to do a simple field test, because if we’d have had to wait for the actual electron-microscope lab test, we wouldn’t have made the cut-off date.
Short Sales – Salvation or Scam?
There are short sale gurus out there all over the place selling seminars and CDs and books to Realtors on how to do short sales – I spent a weekend in one, and actually it was pretty interesting.
…Realtors are getting burned out by loss mitigation departments who are uncooperative, buyers are turned off by the uncertainty and delay that is involved with a short sale, and of course, sellers are often totally burned when they cannot complete their short sale and get foreclosed on, which is happening a couple of times per week at least in Watsonville right now.
…It helps if the seller has already had an offer that maybe didn’t come together, and that they are in contact with the lender’s loss mitigation department and have perhaps worked out an agreement with them already, and you can just walk in, furnish the missing contract, cash, and loan, and be on your way. Other than that, you’re probably much better off finding a nice bank-owned REO property, or (suspend your disbelief here, just for a second) buy a house from a buyer who isn’t totally distressed and facing foreclosure.