Today I wanted to discuss what I feel the most important thing to look for in a real estate when it comes to completing a short sale. Its experience and success with the transactions. I was actually an investor in the first short sale I was involved with; this is before I got into real estate. Since becoming a real estate agent in 2006 I’ve helped over 400 people with these types of transactions and we have an extremely high success rate compared to the national average. The homeowners that hire us and see the process through to the end, over 90% of those transactions close and the homeowner gets their short sale completed; the national average is 30%.
It isn’t just a question of whether or not they deal with a lot of short sales, it’s if they can actually get them to close. Realtor Magazine said recently that 43% of the real estate agents were going to close one or less transaction in 2014; the bottom 70% of real estate agents were only going to close ten transactions. My team and I typically handle over 100 transaction. I’d like to alert you to when you talk to a real estate agent about short sales and they say they deal with a lot of them, make sure you have that agent quantify that for you. They may only be handling a handful of transactions a year, so one short sale may be a lot when compared to their other transactions. In reality when compared to someone like me, where I handle over 80 transactions in a 12 month period, knowing the most recent trends for lenders, knowing the policy guidelines from the different investors is a benefit to you knowing that you’ll get the best possible outcome or the highest chance of success with your short sale.
The takeaway is that when talking to real estate agents about short sales have them quantify to you what their production is; it doesn’t hurt to even have them show you their production on the MLS. Pick up the phone and give us a call or fill out the short sale request form if there’s anything else we can do for you.