Hapster

Hi John,

I concur with Shelly and others comments that as a buyer, a pre-foreclosure/short sale is a much more difficult (if not ominous) option if you are looking for a bargain. The reason short sales don't close at a very high percentage, even with a willing buyer and seller, is because neither the buyer nor seller controls the foreclosure clock.

Our experience is that the clock runs out for the seller before the short sale offer can be negotiated between all the mortgage lien holders. Banks are required by law to follow a specific timetable when a mortgage goes into default and therefore the foreclosure process will overtakes the short sale process more times than not.

You may want to pursue a short sale because it helps out the seller from possible foreclosure and you get a bargain in the process. But the banks don't want to be the only party to lose out financially - they want the seller to feel a level of emotional and financial pain. And when there are multiple lien holders (second mortgage, line of credit, tax lien, etc), the junior liens don't want to give up their stake in the diminishing collateral without a fight. This will drag out the process and in many cases, run out the clock.

As a team who specializes in bank-owned (REO) properties (both buying and selling) and has sold over 30 homes this year from Haymarket to Stafford, we know this first hand. We have had our client’s short sale offers sit at the bank (Loss Mitigation department) for more than 60 days only to find out that the property has been foreclosed on and the expectant buyer's offer has gone by the wayside.

On the flip side, we just recently had to call a local real estate agent listing a short sale and tell her that the bank had assigned the property to us as an REO. She had no idea that the foreclosure was even pending! The irony is that she was listing it at $100K more as a short sale than we did as an REO. Once we listed it, we took multiple offers immediately and had a contract locked in with the bank in 3 days.

If you would like help with finding homes in the Haymarket are, you can check out our website (http://www.tpgrealtors.com) and make specific selections for Short Sale and REO/Bank/HUD/Corp Owned. Use the Advanced search to find listings in Dominion Valley.

If you'd like help setting up a search, just let us know. Our buyer specialists know the short sale and foreclosure market and can help you find solid value as well as help you through the sales process.

Regards, Hap - Wed May 28 2008, 17:20

Gainesville has taken off in the past several years. Major growth in new homes has sparked a need to incorporate significant shopping close to home. Over the last two years Lowe's and Target have added super stores to the retail experience.

Also, Virginia Gateway at Linton Hall Rd and Rte 29 has added a number of chain restaraunts and boutique stores in a town-center setting. Other shopping and professional buildings are being built in Heritage Hunt (55+) as well as Dominion Valley and Somerset.

There is talk that a new Costco will be built on Rte 29 near Lake Manassas and Virginia Oaks.

Hope that helps. - Sun May 27 2007, 07:58

Since Trulia has interfaces through many different sources and sometimes for the same listing, it is possible that a home may be under contract, expired, or withdrawn before you see it. I know I have a listing that sold last month (April) that is still showing active on Trulia because the sold transaction hasn't been completely cleared through our broker's database which feeds Trulia (and others).

My best advise is to take what you see on open, syndicated systems like Realtor.com, Trulia, Google, etc with some level of caution. Because these are tremendous aggregators of MLS data, they are subject to data latency and become stale quickly.

Find a good, local real estate agent's website for your home searching. Ask him/her how often the data is refreshed with the supporting MLS. If it isn't at least daily, move on to another. The best level of service would be a web site that has direct query access to the MLS. - Thu May 24 2007, 23:27