Southwest Florida Title Insurance & Real Estate Blog

We are absolutely thrilled to announce our support of summer campers at the Alliance for the Arts. During the month of May, a portion of our revenue from every real estate closing will be donated to the Alliance to fund scholarships for summer camp tuition.

“The Alliance for the Arts is the state designated arts agency for Lee County; a member supported non-profit with a passion to facilitate and nurture the creation, development, promotion, and education of arts and culture.” There is no place better to witness the Alliance’s fulfillment of that passion than at its Summer Arts Camps. Kids aged 5 to 12 from all walks of life fill the Alliance eight weeks during the summer, lifting their voices, moving their feet and creating an array of visual arts. And each week culminates final stage performances which are an absolute riot. Take a look for yourself.

We are sold on the arts and their positive impact on the children of Southwest Florida. Here’s proof. If you’d like to learn more about the Alliance, check them out at ArtInLee.org. Thanks so much for your support! Oh, and the kids say thanks too!

Guess which title company in Fort Myers just won Best Use of Theme at the Florida Realtors® Convention and Trade Expo? Well, it’s not like you have to guess with the photo above. 🙂

It’s not that we’re trying to toot our own horn, because we’re not. It’s just that we deal with stressful situations on a daily basis. You see, short sale orchestration is HARD WORK! And when you work in a combustion chamber five days a week (sometimes six) like we do, sometimes you just gotta let your hair down and have fun…and that’s exactly what we did at the 2012 Florida Realtors® Convention and Trade Expo.

We actually started planning for the convention months in advance because we knew that we wanted to GO BIG. As you can tell from the photo above, our theme was “Ride the Title Wave of Excellence.” We chose this theme because the overall theme at the convention was “Good Vibrations” as you’ll see in the video below.

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Hey there! Just wanted to give you a heads up that the Bonita Springs-Estero Association of Realtors® will be presenting the Southwest Florida Global Real Estate Expo tomorrow (3/2/12) from 9am to 5pm at the Holiday Inn Airport.

I’ll actually be a part of the short sale and foreclosure panel from 11 – 12:30 pm, so if you plan on attending, I hope to see you there. It’s only $10 and it’s open to the public so it would be great if you would attend. 🙂 Here are the rest of the details:

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Fast forward 14 months and YES, “The Hardest Short Sale Ever” had closed!!!

That day was a clear reminder of just how proud I am of our team here at Winged Foot Title. As you may imagine, a process this complicated yielded many useful insights which we employ daily in our operations. But as we surge into 2012, we wanted to share with you three of those  insights that may be helpful in your business as well.

We call them our “Three Cs”:

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Well we’ve made it. The girls – my wife Lydia and daughter Emerson – and I left Fort Myers late Tuesday and made it to Jacksonville before packing it in. We started slowly this morning but banked enough time for a quick pit stop in charming Savannah, GA.

We hit Savannah about lunch time. Online and friend reviews took us to Soho South Cafe, which lived up to its billing. Lydia had a Mediterranean grill; Emerson a PB & J; and I the salmon BLT on the recommendation of Liza, our server. The restaurant is an eclectic mix of furniture and art. Its only consistent design element within the warehouse shell is its inconsistency. We were reminded of one of our favorites from Philadelphia – The White Dog Cafe. The lunch crowd was part local – from lawyers talking their first cases before certain testy judges to businessmen – and part tourist. Overall a great spot for our first stop in Savannah.

Savannah is a wonderfully walkable place – quite a welcome reprieve from what we are used to. We strolled from Soho South Cafe to Chippewa Square then snaked through side streets back to the wagon to get back on the road. We were not disappointed when we rolled into Charleston a couple of hours later..

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First of all, I love the HousingWire news feeds.  If you aren’t subscribed to a RSS feed or aren’t keeping tabs via Twitter, you should.  Check out www.housingwire.com.

This article was posted at HousingWire on Monday by Kerri Panchuk:  ”Survey Shows First-Time Homebuyers Growing Weary of Short Sales”.  In it, the author cites a recent survey that indicates a slide in the percentage of first-time homebuyers who have acquired short sales – from 54.1% in November 2009 to 39.7% in August.  We are all aware of the technical challenges of short sales; but the payoff in dealing with and overcoming those challenges is, according to the report cited, that “short sales . . . generally sell at prices 27% lower than non-distressed properties . . . .”  I got to thinking that if this is true  – that a buyer could expect a 27% discount by buying a short sale – then it would be nuts to “grow weary” of them.  Nuts, unless of course these first-time homebuyers are entering into short sale transactions with poorly set expectations.

Having orchestrated over 700 short sales over the last three years, we understand just how wrong things can go when expectations are not set properly.  So here are a few pointers mostly from a buyer’s agent’s perspective which should go a long way toward helping to manage your buyer’s expectations and toward helping them hang in there to take advantage of the short sale savings.

There is no substitute for good old-fashioned homework and reconnaissance when it comes to making an offer on a short sale.  To wit, you should know or try to find out:

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This was a great question I was asked earlier this week, during a short sale process presentation I did to a group of REALTOR’s from Sellstate Priority Realty, a very successful brokerage in Cape Coral, Florida.  It was a very engaged group, and I was glad when someone asked a question about what to do about a junior lien in a primary home short sale scenario.

Here is a short video clip (about 4 minutes) that addresses this common issue:

So as you heard, Liz and Lynda presented the following scenario of a primary home short sale of a Cape Coral property. The owner of the property is disabled and can no longer afford the home.  Here are the details:

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My company, Winged Foot Title, (a Fort Myers title company) understands the value of home ownership. More importantly, we understand the value of protecting the American dream. We know that title insurance is the key to eliminating risks in real estate transactions.

Title insurance is valued by:

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