I’ve got a buyer thinking about making an offer on a short sale property.
Remember, a short sale is where the owner owes more on the house than they can sell it for. They’re most often incredibly long, frustrating sales, and often, the sales never actually complete. You have to get the lender to agree to take less than what is owed, and, well, I don’t want to go into a huge short sale discussion now, but know that they’re often ugly transactions.
On the plus side, if the listing agent deals often with short sales, knows that they’re doing, then you’ve got a better chance of actually purchasing a short sale home. That’s a better chance, but still no guarantee.
Today, there are 665 single family homes in the Greater Tucson area marked as a short sales in the Tucson MLS. In the last 6 months, 139 disclosed short sales have actually sold.
Which makes the chances of a short sale closing roughly one in five.
Last time I ran that calculation back in March, it was one in ten.
Progress?
May 6th, 2008 at 6:51 am
HI Kelly,
We should look at the ratios for the homes that went under offer that sold because that is the true indicator of how many actually closed.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hi Anne! Very true. If we had better access to the MLS database, we could be much more exact. As it is, I can’t determine how many went contingent and didn’t close without manually checking hundreds of listings. And even then, I don’t know if it fell out because of inspections, a buyer failing to qualify, or the bank not coming to terms with the seller. I would call this a rough estimate.