Short Sale Definition: a home sale where the seller owes more than what the home is worth and is asking the lender(s) to accept an amount that is less than the amount owed to them as payment in full. The same problem continues to come up day after day and I finally have the time and focus to sit down and write about it. For the last year now, short sales have become a common type of listing in our market and in markets around the county. A short sale is a "Liar Listing." In most circumstances, the seller and … [Read more...]
Twin Cities Foreclosures & Short Sales – A Report Analysis
August 14, 2008 by 4 Comments
For several weeks now, Jeff Allen (and several others) from MAAR and I have been working diligently to provide an update to our one-of-a-kind research report we released a few months ago. We've just released Foreclosures and Short Sales in the Twin Cities Housing Market Q2 2008 Update. The report contains updates to a lot of the data we've previously reported on, but also contains some new information and trend analysis. Jeff Allen is a real wizard with data and analysis and this report is the best snapshot … [Read more...]
Crazy Homeowner – Keep Kids in Private School & Mom at Home, Lose the House
August 11, 2008 by 1 Comment
CNBC has a new show called "On the Money with Carmen Wong Ulrich" and I recently saw a segment that drove me nuts. Click here to see the video. Here's a summary: They send one kid to private school ($14,000/yr currently), the 2nd will be in kindergarten next year Mom stays at home Mom can start working 2 days a week next year when youngest goes to private school Their mortgage rate will adjust... in 2011 Their house has no equity so they were thinking about doing a short sale to reduce their monthly … [Read more...]
Loose Lending Broke Housing, Tight Lending Keeps it Broken
June 20, 2008 by 7 Comments
The several years of "loose lending" by mortgage lenders helped bring a surge of bad loan programs with borrowers that were either overextended from Day One or should have been unqualified to begin with. This surge has now become a tsunami of foreclosures and short sales, which Jeff Allen and I have lumped together as the term: "Lender Mediated Sales." Now that lenders, banks, retirement funds, investment bankers, average investors and everyone else have all been bitten by the fallout from this housecological … [Read more...]
Minneapolis/St. Paul MLS Addresses Foreclosures & Short Sales… Kinda
June 10, 2008 by 2 Comments
The RMLS of Minnesota, which is the governing body of the MLS in the Twin Cities and is owned by the 4 local REALTOR associations, has made some policy changes in regards to the reporting of foreclosures on the MLS, effective on Thursday: The "In Foreclosure/Lender Owned?" field: Initially will be an agent-only field (not available on Customer reports or on public Web sites through Broker Reciprocity). Options are: Yes, No and Not Disclosed For NorthstarMLS, Foreclosure is defined as the homeowner being … [Read more...]
Short Sales & Foreclosures in Plymouth and Maple Grove
May 19, 2008 by 2 Comments
I took a few hours Sunday to review short sale and foreclosure sales in Plymouth and Maple Grove during the last 10 months and found some interesting information. Before I explain what I found, I want to explain what I looked at: Homes that were clearly a short sale OR a foreclosed, bank owned home. This meant I only searched the terms like "short sale" and "bank owned" or "REO" and not all the other terms that can sometimes be ambiguous. This gave me a short list to work from, but it was as close to … [Read more...]
Price Per Square Foot – Lender-Mediated vs Traditional Sellers
May 6, 2008 by 1 Comment
As a follow-up to the report I co-authored with Jeff Allen from MAAR, below is a comparison of price per finished square foot between lender-mediated sales and traditional sales. As can be seen by the chart above, there is a substantial price discount on a cost per square foot basis when you look at lender mediated sales. My reasoning for why this is happening is as follows: Short Sales Short sale transactions often take several months to come together, thereby reducing the number of buyers willing to deal … [Read more...]
Aaron Dickinson and MAAR Publish Report on Foreclosures and Short Sales on Twin Cities MLS
May 6, 2008 by 1 Comment
You can find the report here. Background In late October I wrote a blog post regarding foreclosures and short sales listed on the MLS in the Twin Cities. Once I started researching this topic, I found that the information I was uncovering was previously unknown in our market and that the trends it offered were very insightful. I shared this first-step research with Jeff Allen from MAAR and we decided to work together to explore it further. The hardest part of this whole research project was developing the … [Read more...]
Foreclosures and Short Sales Skewing Twin Cities MLS Statistics
May 5, 2008 by 6 Comments
In the first quarter of 2007, sold homes reported by the MLS were 90% "Traditional Sellers" and 10% "Bank Mediated Sellers" (bank owned foreclosures and/or short sales). In the first quarter of 2008, these "bank mediated" listings comprised more than 27% of the sales. The Median Sales Price of homes sold by Traditional Sellers in Q1 2008 was $220,000, down only 3.9% in the last 12 months, while the Median Sales Price for the bank mediated listings was only $155,000, down a substantial 10.4% in the last 12 months. … [Read more...]
Q&A: How Long to Hear Back on a Short Sale?
March 31, 2008 by 2 Comments
Question: I submitted an offer on a listing where the seller needs to get approval of a short sale from their bank(s)...how long will it take to hear back? Answer: Responses from banks on short sales is typically taking anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months, with 1+ months being the most typical. Most lenders are so bogged down with short sales that they're taking 2+ weeks simply to get to processing your offer. At that point they'll order a BPO (Broker Price Opinion) from local agent(s) and ask the seller to … [Read more...]
