Today, I want to talk about the 3 key or critical elements of doing a Short Sale. Before I get into that, I want to give you the definition of what a short sale is. A short sale is when the bank agrees to take less than what is owed on the property in terms of a mortgage. It’s when the homeowner is in some sort of a hardship, mainly a financial hardship. Now, some questions that arises … can you do a short sale when a homeowner is current on their mortgage? Some banks may allow you to do that and some banks will require that the homeowner be behind on their mortgage payments. You got to find that out.

In 2009, I decided to focus my business on short sales and now the bulk of my business is short sales.  Some of the files that I work on are those I partnered with other investors that bring the short sales to me so that I can process the files. I also work with real estate agents that bring me their short sales.

Now getting back to the 3 Critical Elements of Doing a Short Sale:

1. Follow-up. The first one is follow up. What I mean by follow-up is that you need to get organize and you need to have a system in place so that you can follow-up with the bank because the banks have a tendency to lose your documents and have a tendency to just not work on your file. So you need to be consistently calling them, following-up with them and making sure that all documents are updated.  Otherwise they will close your file and you have to start all over again. That is one of the challenges that a lot of people face that are doing short sales; they just don’t understand that and they just get frustrated.
2. The second critical element in doing a short sale is the BPO which stands for Broker Price Opinion. It is important that you go to each and every one of the Broker Price Opinion (BPO). It is very important that you give the BPO Agents immediate access to the property because they are being graded by the bank on how fast that they get access to the property. So, it is important to give those BPO Agents immediate access and that you develop a relationship with them. Due to the volume, we have developed relationship with some of the key BPO Agents in our market.
3. The third critical element is Negotiation – It is when you deal with the person that’s reviewing the file.  Negotiation is not screaming at the negotiator, is not yelling to the negotiator saying that the value is too high but it’s the art of negotiation. It’s something that you have to learn and it’s a skill that has to be developed. I actually developed that skill once I started working on doing short sales. I learned that it’s very important to know what true negotiation is and having the confidence to negotiate.

So, those are the 3 key elements. If there is any question you have on short sales, please post your comments below. I will do my best to respond to your comments.

Now, if you are a Real Estate Investor or Real Estate Agent and you just feel frustrated with the short sale process, please contact me.  You see the contact us link at the bottom; get in contact with me and let’s try to work together if possible.

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TAKE ACTION, BE FOCUSED & CRUSH IT!