One of the biggest battles we face in the title industry is dealing with attorneys, management companies, and community associations in getting estoppels.
Whether we are dealing with a short sale property or a traditional sale, if the property has an association, we have to request an estoppel. You may be asking, what is an estoppel?
You are in the process of purchasing a new home and someone asks if you are getting title insurance? You think to yourself, what is title insurance?
I’ll answer that question in just a moment. But first, buying a new home is typically one of the biggest purchases you’ll ever make in your life and it can be extremely overwhelming!
Although most people don’t think about it, you want to be sure when purchasing a new home that there are no problems with the home’s title.
You also want to be sure the seller really owns said property. But how can you be sure?
Boom. ↑ There’s your answer. 🙂
Title Insurance insures an owner of real estate against the loss occasioned by defects in, liens against, or other conditions rending the owner’s title to the property unmarketable.
Problems with the title can limit your use and enjoyment of the property as well as create financial loss. Owners Title insurance creates peace of mind!
What is the process? The process is very easy! Once your sales contract has been accepted…
BusinessDictionary.com defines a distressed sale as an urgent sale of normal or distressed goods, at deeply discounted prices.
For the purpose of this article, “distressed goods” refers to homes that sell at deeply discounted prices via either a short sale or foreclosure.
We have been and still are in a housing market unlike any we’ve seen in years. The economy of the past few years has produced more properties that are either in foreclosure or short sales status.
From our point of view, many buyers (we’ll call Group A) routinely steered clear of distressed sales because they had the idea that these properties were damaged money pits and very likely to be trashed. Therefore they avoided taking such a risk on a big investment.
But then there are others (we’ll call Group B) who enter the market either for the first time or as a seasoned buyers, who view distressed sales as an opportunity.
They’re searching for (and finding) great properties that have been overlooked by those people describe above who categorically excluded foreclosures and short sales.
If you’re part of Group A, you may want to reconsider purchasing a distressed sale because they make great sense, especially when the market is tight.
A short sale is a sale of real estate in which the proceeds from selling the property will fall short of the balance of debts secured by liens against the property and the property owner cannot afford to repay the liens fill amounts, and whereby the lien holders agree to release their lien on the real estate and accept less than the amount owed on the debt.
We work with some amazing and knowledgeable listing agents on short sales in Florida. However, there are occurrences where we have a file where the buyer’s agent is not familiar with the short sale process.
Short sale listings are very different from listings where the seller has equity. When an offer is received on the listing and the seller agrees to the price, it does not mean that the lender will accept the price.
When we receive the offer on a new file we like to talk to the buyer agent and explain how the short sale process works. It is important for them to understand the process for buying a short sale for their clients.
Communication from the short sale processor, listing agent and buyer’s agent play a critical role in keeping the buyers on board.
It is very important for them to know that when we request a response from the buyers, weather it is a counter offer or to provide any information, we usually get only 3 days to respond.
We also like to reach out to their buyer to help educate them as well so they know what to expect.
Here are some things buyer agents should know about short sales in Florida:
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