Mistake #3 – Taking multiple offers and forwarding them on to the lender, and not signing a contract.
This mistake is a big one! This is where Realtors are not only making their life more complicated, but they are also being much less effective with Short Sales, and making it much less likely that the sale will ever close.
Many Realtors treat Short Sale listings as if they are listing an REO for the lender. So they take multiple offers, never signing a contract, forwarding all the offers they get to the lender.
This is not a good way handle a Short Sale listing. First of all the agent is not working for the lender. The agent is working for the seller and must remember that.
Secondly handling the short sale in this fashion simply creates the most hassle possible for you, the agent. You have more buyers and more agents to deal with, all of them bugging you about what’s going on with the lender. There will also be more agents and buyers calling you while the property is still on the market.
This approach also makes it less likely that the listing will ever close. A listing that never closes isn’t a listing worth having is it?
The lender doesn’t want you to send them a bunch of offers – even though they may act like it! The truth is they want one solid buyer.
The Loss Mitigator who will work on the file doesn’t want a bunch of offers without a solid buyer. He’s got too many files on his desk as it is, so he doesn’t want to waste his time on a file that doesn’t look good to him. He doesn’t want to waste his time on a file that doesn’t look like it has a good chance to close. He’ll work on other files first, files that look more promising, file that look like they are more likely to close.
So the Loss Mitigator doesn’t want to spend time on a file that doesn’t have a committed buyer. The Loss Mitigator has anywhere from 150 – 200 active files at any one time. The files that look most likely to get done and closed are the ones that get their priority. A file with a signed contract and a locked in buyer will always look more appealing to the Loss Mitigator.
So if the Loss Mitigator wants a signed contract, not a bunch of offers, and collecting a bunch of offers creates the most possible hassle for the agent, why are agents doing it?
Well it just doesn’t make any sense does it.
So what should you do? When you get an offer, if it looks like it has a chance to be acceptable to the lender – sign the contract. Then forward the completed contract, along with everything else you need to make a complete Short Sale package on to the lender. If you do get any other offers, you can hold them as backup offers in case your first offer isn’t approved by the lender. But they are no more than that, they are back up offers. Stick them in your file until you need them, if you ever do. But do not send them to the lender. You already have the signed and completed contract that you need.
Chris Badger of Strategic Loss Mitigation, along with being a real estate Broker, is known as one of the top experts in Short Sales.
For more information see his blog at www.agentshortsalesuccess.wordpress.com
For his complete Short Sale guide for agents go to “The Ultimate Short Sale Success System”
[tags]Short sale, Short Sales, Agent Short Sale, Realtor Short Sale, Success, training, system[/tags]
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