Short Sale VS Foreclosure

Don’t be a turkey, this one is really an easy fight.  Short Sale VS Foreclosure shouldn’t even be a questions.

We decided to try to compare the options side by side for you.

How to Short Sale In Georgia is so common of a question I thought it’d best to try to answer it.

Ultimately, there’s a bunch of other questions like when to short sale or why to short sale, but How to short sale is relatively easy to answer.

The short answer would be to contact the Jarvis Team.

The longer answer is that you really need to get a real estate agent and get an offer on the home for the bank to even consider you for a short sale.  That coupled with your hardship information is enough for you to “qualify.”  I do get angry when I see signs and advertisements for pre-foreclosure or “potential short sale.”  If your home is up for sale as a potential short sale, then your agent doesn’t know what we know.  If you’re upside down on your home and you have an offer, we can do your short sale.

That’s really the reason we think “How to short sale” is kind of silly question, because the only real components are:

1. your hardship,
2. the offer
3. and the value.

This is one of those questions that doesn’t have an easy answer for anyone.  Most of the time the answer to how long a short sale will take is bank specific.  Most short sale timelines are completely situational.  However, we can give you some guidelines on short sale timelines.

Most Banks won’t consider a short sale without an offer, so we’ll start here.

Short Sale Timeline

0- 30 Days – Jarvis Team Gets An Offer on the home.
90-120 Days – Negotiating with Bank for Approval of Short Sale
30 Days – Buyer to close on property

Total: 180 days (6 Months) for a short sale to be completed from start to finish.

If you happen to be worrying about the foreclosure notice during this time, then rest a little easier.  We’ve not lost any homes due to foreclosure while we have a valid offer.  We can usually postpone the foreclosure without much trouble.

Do you have questions about the Short Sale Timeline?  Remember, it’s bank specific, so Suntrust short sales are going to take much longer and Bank of America Short Sales are now much shorter.

Received A Foreclosure Notice, Now What?

{This is for properties that receive foreclosure notices in the state of Georgia}

My Mom calls them “Nasty Grams” – those letters you get from creditors asking for money or the letters from the HOA about removing that trash can from view.  However, the Nasty Gram of all Nastiness is the foreclosure notice.  To be official it needs to come from an attorney.   It usually starts with:

NOTICE OF SALE UNDER POWER GEORGIA, GWINNETT COUNTY Under and by virtue of the Power of Sale contained in a Security Deed given by Your Name

This will be followed by a lengthy legal description, loan company and amount owed, but what you are looking for is:

within the legal hours of sale on the first Tuesday in

IF you have a date on there, then it’s not a “threaten” letter from the attorney, it’s the real deal.  I would love to say you have nothing to fret if you received a foreclosure notice (also known as a Notice of Default) but time is really of the essence if you want to try to postpone the foreclosure to pursue a short sale.  We can usually help you if we have at least 30 days, but by the time you receive the notice you may only have 20 days, so you must act quickly!!!

Freddie Mac Short Sale Discrimination

If you are doing a short sale as a seller of a home in Atlanta, then you might have a Freddie Mac Loan.  Freddie Mac short sales are different because Freddie Mac is different, but something just came up recently that shocked us.  Not only did Freddie Mac decide that they were going to try to get more than market value but they flat out said their policy is to discriminate against an investor buyer.  Their price for an “Owner Occupant” was $8,000 less than the price for an “investor.”

What’s this mean?

If you have a short sale with Freddie Mac you might have to show preferential treatment to owner occupant buyers over corporate buyers.  This is counter intuitive since many times the investor is the more qualified of the buyers.