Short sale pricing (days on market, short sales, foreclosures)

[photoman_6]

Hi, everyone. It looks like I'll be down there in a couple of weeks and hopefully find THE house. However, it looks like 3/4 of all the properties I like are short sales. I have the time to wait the lenders out, but I need advise on pricing.
What's the concensus from brokerland about offers vs. listing price and how flexible lenders are on accepting lower offers. Is there a magic number?

Thanks in advance. Hope to be able to meet you all sometime after July

[SoFLGal]

Originally Posted by photoman_6

Hi, everyone. It looks like I'll be down there in a couple of weeks and hopefully find THE house. However, it looks like 3/4 of all the properties I like are short sales. I have the time to wait the lenders out, but I need advise on pricing.
What's the concensus from brokerland about offers vs. listing price and how flexible lenders are on accepting lower offers. Is there a magic number?

Thanks in advance. Hope to be able to meet you all sometime after July

That's a tough one. Here's how the banks formulate a price that might work. They look at the days on market, similar homes-within a mile, within 20% of under air square footage, five years newer and five years older on year built, similar style, etc. They look at unemployment rate, what type of buyers are buying-investors, first time home buyers, etc. What type of financing would be common for this type of property-Cash, conventional, FHA, VA, etc

The bank will request many pictures from the list agent. So, the bank will have a really good idea of what the property is worth. The goal is to sell the home in 30 days or less.

So, what I would do is have your Realtor pull these stats so you know what data the banks will be analyzing. Obviously, you want to get a deal so you might want to go a little under what the recent solds are. Some people think they're gonna go in and offer 50% of the market value. Usually the banks will just ignore those type of offers and won't even respond.

If the offer is pretty clean, without a ton of contingencies and is a reasonable offer you should get a response within a few months. Give or take a few months. Much depends on the bank as well. There are some banks that are known to take longer and some that are known to answer back pretty quickly.

To answer your question, I would say that there is not a magic number. You need to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and look at the whole picture.

I would suggest looking at foreclosures as well. They tend to move along a lot quicker.

Good luck with it