Benjaminday

Susan: If you begin the process with a lender to re-negotiate your loan or strike up some deal in lieu of foreclosure, they'll start asking you a lot of questions to see if they're actually get somewhere with the renegotiation. Among those are: why can't you afford the payments? What is your present income? What change in status has occurred that makes it difficult to afford the payments? Be prepared to answer those questions as accurately as possible. They may even ask if you are able to get another job, either switching from what you may presently have or adding another. Short-selling with a deficiency may be an option, but it may not be the best one. It still has a major economic impact to you personally. The first thing I would consider is this: what else do you own outright that you can sell? A TV? A car? A motorcycle? A boat? Many of these items are far more liquid and easier to sell than a $195,000 house. Another thought is to examine your budget, and if you don't have one, create one. Figuring out your annual expenses on and seeing what your monthly average is will help indicate other places where your money is going. MS Excel can be a great starting point and an easy to use piece of software to figure this out.

The bottomline: foreclosure is one of the most detrimental financial circumstances an individual can find themselves in. The ramifications will last for years and may lead to bankruptcy as well (which usually is not as damaging to creditors). Whatever you can do to defend the home is probably the best first option. Homes are selling in Colorado Springs, but demand is off almost 20% from the year before. Fountain Valley has a lot of inventory from $180,000 to $220,000 and not a lot of buying activity (although huge rental activity).

Don't give up, Susan. Don't let the foreclosure process begin, and don't be passive. It sounds like your statement "as of this month I can no longer afford my mortgage" means you are current and are looking with shame at a month when you can't make a payment. If that is true, you are already being extremely proactive by asking questions. Over 70% of those who go into foreclosure NEVER discuss things with their lender. You haven't missed a payment yet and are asking. That tells me that you probably have some decent options out there because you still have time. - Tue Oct 7 2008, 14:45

I would verify this heavily. In Colorado Springs, we have a Craigslist.org scam with individuals examining public records, creating bogus email addresses, indicating that they're eye surgeons performing Lasik in Africa, and requesting people send deposits and applications to them at an African address. The names are usually right or close to right, on a property I have listed they created an email that was really similar to my name as the return email. One piece of bait: the individuals performing this scam are usually offering the properties for well below market value rents.

Not to say that the property you are talking about is illegitimate, it just made my head spin when you wrote the question. Our problem in Colorado Springs is pretty widespread. - Mon Oct 6 2008, 13:24

I have an offer in on a property that is 23% below what is owed. I had a friend negotiate a short with the lender that was 21% light (that closed) and another friend who has one that should close (approved and past appraisal) that 34% light.

I think your metric is a good one, but it is totally a case-by-case basis. Some lenders (even 2nds) just refuse to budge, even though something really is better than the nothing they'll get if the first forecloses. When you write on a short-sale be prepared to not get the home, it is beyond your control (and to some degree beyond the seller's control). - Mon Aug 25 2008, 15:29

I live in one of the more irradiated parts of America, El Paso County where our countywide average score in residences is in excess of 4.00 picocuries/litre, where http://www.epa.gov/radon indicates a responsible individual needs to take action.

For the most part, the real estate community in Colorado Springs is pretty well informed about it, and as a general rule of thumb, I tell buyers to test for it ($125) during their inspection period, no matter where the home is, what kind of home (condo), anything. The rule seems to be more aggressive, not less aggressive, and I would not rule out a day in the future when it is a disclosure nationally and treated like Lead-Based Paint.

Saying that, your question is about resale. What is totally amazing to me is that while Colorado Springs is fairly conservative, we are extremely progressive in dealing with Radon. It's everywhere, you can mitigate it to a "safer" level, move on with life. A $1200 repair is usually less than 1% for dealing with something the EPA claims is the 2nd leading cause of lung-cancer in the US.

But in Summit County (like Breckenridge and Keystone, where it can be really high) the agents I've met treat it like no big deal and may disparage someone taking action. Same thing throughout parts of Metro Denver. There are people who will say "well, the other homes in the neighborhood don't have a system... is n't that a defect unique to that house?" The logic is okay on the surface. Deeper down, the reality is: have any of these other people tested for it? Did their inspector scoff about it because they didn't have Radon training? Did someone bring up the fact that the threshold is much higher in Canada? Or lower in Sweden? Is the house in Canada or Sweden?

It's one of the crazier things out there, and I think you as the buyer are in the driver's seat. This is the time to get the present owner's cooperation in making remedy. Hard to do that after you close. But I think for your peace of mind you can consider a county like El Paso County Colorado, home to a half million people. and our average score (according to both UCCS Chemistry Lab which does most real estate Radon tests and El Paso County Health Department) is in excess of the EPA level and what you are finding in the home you're buying. In fact, what you're finding is low by our standards! But we deal with it, we move on, and most homes around here have habitable basements.

A really good idea would be to ask for an extension of a couple of days in the inspection period to get written bids by one to two EPA-qualified/certified professionals. Evaluate how much of a visual eyesore they need to create to get rid of the problem. That's really the biggest concern. Most systems can be put in a discreet location, and since it does it's job, it really moves on to an "out of site, out of mind" reality.

The one thing I would disagree with in the previous comments is the pocket incidence. Yes, some areas generally have higher radon, but that doesn't mean you only search for it in some neighborhoods or that there is any consistency to the scores within neighborhoods. We see 800% variances on the west side all the time (3 in one home, 24 in the next, 56 in the next, 5 in the next, all perfect tests). We have a neighborhood out east built on sand which around here usually does not have any radon. I still have tests done because the fill dirt for some homes (not all, just a few) came from the west side of town, which is all the shoulders of Pikes Peak, which is all granite, and granite has uranium which decomposes to radium which decomposes to radon. No joke, the non-native west side fill dirt imported radon around the foundations of some homes thirty miles east. So you never know. The houses are fine, and once a mitigation system is put on, the air quality is probably better than most other homes. - Thu Aug 14 2008, 11:17

http://www.goldhillmesa.com is advertising itself this way. It is a new built area on the ridge west of downtown, between the s/w and occ neighborhoods, designed to look Victorian and Craftsman but is totally wired. It has not sold well yet, primarily because it launched in 2007, right when new home sales were in the tank. Correspondingly, the few spec homes over there are some good deals. It's really close to downtown and will be anchored with a variety of light retail.

But like any newly built area, what is planned, and what is there now are two different things.

As far as the classic, walk-to-convenience neighborhoods, there is one grocery downtown near Tejon and Boulder, and the area around Colorado College is doing well with the Old North End, the Grand Dame of all COS neighborhoods immediately to the north, and Divine Redeemer and Hastings to the east. Patty Jewett is to the east of the Old North End and features a lot of the great bungalow architecture of our past and is still on the way up. The area at Corona and Columbia around Dog Tooth Coffee is a really popular meeting area. Sales activity downtown right now is slow by downtown standards, primarily because it has been the most popular and bullish in the last half decade. It has not seen much in the way of price correction at all despite our market being off for more than two years. - Thu Aug 14 2008, 07:48