Any experience/knowledge with short sales or foreclosure home sales?

[moonsky]

I saw a lot of them on the listing and wonder whether it is a good idea to consider those. Any thoughs? TIA!

[gordo]

Yes! I just recently bought a foreclosure and also had an offer on a short sale! IMO, short sales are not worth the headaches. I have heard of some closing relatively quickly and if there is only one bank involved and if it is an "approved" short sale, it could be a good deal. The one we had an offer on had two banks involved. We put our offer in in May. In about one month, the first mortgage bank approved our offer, however the 2nd bank involved strung us along for months! They kept changing how much money they wanted out of the deal. We hung on for 3 1/2 months until we found the foreclosure that we fell in love with and walked away from the short sale.

The foreclosure went much smoother! We put our offer in the 2nd day the house was on the market and we were already the 3rd offer. We must have had the highest offer (we bid over asking as is typical with foreclosures in this area) and our offer was accepted in one day. We closed about 6 weeks later with very little issues. Of course, we found the best inspector we could since they don't have to disclose anything to you. We also knocked on neighbor's doors to see if they could tell us anything about the house. We did find out our house had flooded from a neighbor. If we didn't ask, we would have never known. But at least we knew when and how it flooded and that it was an issue we could fix.

There are some very good deals to be had out there if you are willing to take a small risk and maybe have a longer wait time than a typical transaction.

Feel free to PM me with any specific questions.

[DebbieJ]

We put an offer on one short sale and one foreclosure and considered two other foreclosures. If you have plenty of time and patience, you can get a great deal. Remember these sales are as-is. The seller of the short sale accepted our offer and while we were waiting for word from the bank, we had our inspection done. After finding structural issues and mold, we walked away.

Make sure you have a good realtor, too. He/she can help you navigate it all.

[brismom]

We bought a foreclosure and got ourselves a good deal. As pp mentioned the property is as is so you need to consider that. Our house came with no door knobs, missing faucets and some othewise weird missing items (thermostat cover?!) Our agnets thinks either the previous owners left very bitter or b/c of the traffic of people in to see the place some people took off with stuff. But it was all stuff to consider when making our offer. Everything as far as the sale went very smoothly and quickly as opposed to the sometimes lengthy wait on short sales that we had heard about

[baileygirl]

In our city there are lots of houses on the market as short sales, so a few months ago we looked at a bunch of them. We found few that didn't need work inside and several where peopled pulled out pretty much anything they could (lights, fans, smoke alarms, ovens, etc). We ended up putting an offer in on one, it took 4 months to hear back and they raised the offer by 42k. I didn't like the experience, so we decided to stay where we are for the time being.