IT’S TIME TO RUN LIKE HELL
May 16, 2011: Horror stories abound from potential home buyers and Realtors forced to wait 90 or more days for a response to a purchase offer or being required to fax short-sale applications or other paperwork as many as 50 times.
Like I say, I get that lenders want to cut their losses in a short sale. But considering that banks filed 68,239 notices of default on California residents during the first quarter, according to DataQuick, you’d think lenders would be eager to avoid repossessing additional properties.
Las Vegas is even worse: the resale market is taking off with 4,970 sales in April, a 13.8 percent increase from the same month a year ago. That’s on the heels of more than 5,000 sales in March. Median resale price, however, continued to drop to $106,900 in April, down 14.5 percent from a year ago and a step closer to the $100,000 mark that Murphy predicted as a possibility earlier this year. About 50 percent of homes were purchased with cash and 78 percent were vacant, according to an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal.
But thousands of other home buyers are still struggling to get short sales approved.
Many lenders don’t get serious about short sales until a property owner starts missing mortgage payments. By that time, however, foreclosure proceedings can be imminent. This is crazy, you would think they’d work to sell the property before people start missing payments.
The housing crunch won’t last forever. We shouldn’t be going out of our way to prolong the pain.
