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 […]
short sale
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). […]
[M08/S09] Free Home Inspection and Termite Inspection
We are big believers in getting a complete disclosure package for all potential buyers, because we know that doing so will ultimately result in a higher net for the seller and a much smoother transaction with less risk of fall-out. In fact, we’re such big believers in this that we will agree to credit the […]
[M04/S16] Selling your home with little or no equity
After you have crunched the numbers it may be apparent that, after including the costs of the sale, you are in a situation where you’d be selling your home with little equity, or worse – negative equity. Put another way, you are going to come up short – considering the current market value of your […]
The Incredible Shrinking Housing Market
Some new housing data was released, revealing the incredible shrinking housing market. For starters, 31% of all homes sold in Q2 of this year were either short sales or bank-owned foreclosure sales, which together are collectively known as “distressed sales”. The percentage of overall market activity that was distress-driven actually went up from 26% year-over-year, […]
Santa Cruz Real Estate Great Debate
You really need to look at the year before to see how the market performed – and from the statistics, we can see the median home price, county-wide, is actually down 33.5% in April of 2009 compared to a year ago. … Honestly, I am mystified how people can take a few anecdotes, completely ignore the state of the economy and the housing market as a whole, and now herald, with strident authority, that we are now at the bottom of the market and THIS, TODAY is the time to buy, or you will miss out on the chance of a lifetime. … Well, that’s not true – short sales can also occur at those prices, and some people who have had their homes a long, long time may have enough equity in them to compete with all the REOs and short sales. … Personally, I think it’s going to put increased pressure on the bottom of the market, as many people who were looking at buying a lower-priced “starter” home may now be thinking of stretching to go for one of these “premium” foreclosures which I expect we’ll be seeing.
Santa Cruz Real Estate Deathmatch
Whether you think the current housing crisis is a cause of a symptom of the economic meltdown in the United States and abroad, there’s no denying that there’s a great deal of uncertainty about how long this recession will last , how deep it will cut , and what this means for people looking to buy a house in Santa Cruz today. 
I’ve said it several times in various postings to this blog, but I think it bears repeating: I think home prices in Santa Cruz county will continue to drop for the foreseeable future – and by that, I mean the rest of this year, at least. … It’s not a new thing – as I mentioned a blog entry or two ago, this multiple-offer feeding-frenzy has been going on at least 18 months, I don’t see that it is more common today than it was a year or so ago – but perhaps it’s being talked about more in the media, as there is now more effort into talking up the economy rather than talking it down. … I had seen it when it had come up (I send myself e-mails from my automated system for every bank-owned home that hits the market), but at the moment, I had a number of deadlines I was working to meet so I didn’t look at the particulars to see that it was really an incredible deal. … Actually, when it started out, I don’t think it was a short sale – but as the months went by, the price was reduced until finally the owner owed more on it than the market would pay.
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.