Frederick County Short Sale Blog | Homes for Sale in Frederick Md

Buying a Short Sale in Frederick

Today there are 232 homes on listed on the Frederick real estate market as "Short Sales".  This is 17% of the listings.  Of the homes actually selling each month, short sales and foreclosures make up 30% to 35%.

If you are considering buying a home in today's Frederick real estate market, you will find some great deals in short sales and foreclosures.  These are the homes with the most motivated sellers.  In a distressed sale, the home's list price will keep being reduced until someone buys it.  It has to.

What You Need to Know About Buying a Short Sale

Short sales are different from foreclosures in one basic way:  In a foreclosure, the bank owns the home, so the buyer will be negotiating with the bank, just like in a traditional sale.  The negotiation usually takes 1 to 3 days.  *Usually*, there are always possible glitches in process.  Appraisals are continuing to cause some problems.

With a short sale, the buyer is negotiating with the seller, who has to then negotiate with the lender(s) to sell the home "short" of what they owe.  This is the part that takes so long.  The investors must be contacted for "third-party approval", which can sometimes go for more than one round of counters.  The best-case scenarios take 90 days, the worst-case scenarios really shouldn't take more than 6 months.  

What a buyer needs to be sure of is that the listing agent on the short sale they are thinking of buying knows what they are doing.  Short sales are more detailed and difficult than other sales.  The paperwork has to be done properly, or the banks will not even look at it... often they'll just shred it.  One lender told us not too long ago that Bank of America was receiving 3000 short sale packages a week!  The sheer number is overwhelming to banks, and if they don't have all the forms they need, they don't have the time or resources to hunt the Realtor down to get the needed forms. 

If you would consider buying a short sale, it is a great advantage to use a buyer's agent with short sale training.  They can help the buyer understand the process, and help vet the viability of the short sale. Chris Highland is a CDPE, Certified Distressed Housing Expert.

Contact us for more details or check out our website.

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The Highland Group