Short Sales

Unfortunately, there's nothing short about the process of buying a short sale. In fact, the chance of closing a deal on this type of home sale is a long-shot. If you'd like to make an offer on a short sale listing, you should be ready to wait several months for all the parties involved in the process to approve or reject your offer.

Because short sale offers are usually unsuccessful, Redfin does not currently support short sales for tours or offers. However, in the Seattle area, we've partnered with a great local agent and attorney, Matt Van Winkle, who specializes in handling short sale deals. If you work with him, you can still get 15% of the commission credited back to you when you close on a home.

Otherwise, Redfin is happy to help you tour and make offers on other homes that are free and clear to be sold, including bank-owned homes listed in the MLS, also known as REOs. To learn more about short sales, read on.

A short sale listing is one in which the seller still owns the property, but owes more money on his mortgage than he will get from selling the property. Most often, more than one bank holds a mortgage on the property and each bank has to approve the sale. These banks and lenders will be evaluating multiple offers at once, many coming from wealthy investors with all cash offers and the patience to wait it out.

Short sale homes are still owned by the home-owner, while foreclosures are owned by banks. If the home-owner cannot sell the home through a short sale, the bank initiates foreclosure to try to sell the home directly, often in an auction. If the auction fails to turn up a buyer willing to pay at least what the bank was owed on the home, the home becomes Real Estate Owned (REO), where the owner is the bank. The bank then typically sells the property through a real estate agent.

Redfin flags listings marked as short sales by the listing agent or through the marketing remarks for a listing. You can exclude these short sales from your search by selecting Exclude short sales from your search options.

However, we are unable to flag listings marked as short sales in the listing's agent-only remarks. So you may not realize that the property you are trying to buy is a short sale. When you schedule a tour to go see homes or submit an offer we'll confirm that the homes you are looking at are not short sales.

The ownership of the mortgage on a short sale home usually belongs to more than one party, so you'll likely have to convince multiple banks and lenders to take a loss on their original loan. This is why it takes so long to approve a short sale offer.

Here's the typical life cycle of a mortgage loan on a short sale:

1. The customer buys a home and secures a mortgage loan for financing.
2. The customer's mortgage lender then sells the original loan to a secondary mortgage market.
3. That loan gets bundled together with a bunch of others to be sold again as mortgage-backed securities.
4. The ownership of the original loan is now split up among various investors - many of whom are overseas and now possibly bankrupt.

This complicated scenario makes it nearly impossible to figure out who has authority over approving a short payoff on any one mortgage. Loan servicers also complicate the situation: they could care less whether an offer actually goes through and are dealing with thousands of these cases at once.

The Redfin forums are full of questions and advice on short sales. Here are some recent posts from frustrated buyers:

"We've been waiting since January for the bank to say yes or no on our offer. Apparently, no one cares, even though the homeowners haven't paid their mortgage for over 1 1/2 years. We are renting, awesome credit, and have money (50% to put down)...one would think the bank would be anxious to sell it to us. But noooooo, we're still waiting..." Posted April 8, 2009.
Read the full post.

"I bid $440K on a short sale. I was told my offer was second over a $380K all cash offer. When the cash offer fell through the listing agent said we could revise our bid to $380K since the bank had already accepted that. It seemed weird, but how could I pass that up? So I resubmitted the bid at $380K only to be told later that my $380K bid was submitted alongside a $420K bid to the bank, which was lower than my original bid..." Posted May 5, 2009. Read the full post.

Read more threads on short sales.

If you still plan to make an offer on a short sale, be prepared for a long haul. In the meantime, we suggest that you continue touring and considering other homes in case the short sale doesn't go through. Keep in mind that even if your offer is accepted, the banks will usually ask you to buy the home as-is and won't pay for any repairs discovered by an inspection.

To learn more about short sales, here's some helpful information from the recent news and Redfin forums contributors:

• NPR article on hope and frustration buying short sales.
• Seattle Post Intelligencer article on short sale war stories.
• An article on why short sales take so long from Seattle's Rain City Guide.
• Los Angeles Times article on how to sell a short sale.
• North County Times article on why foreclosure might be a better option for short sale owners.
• Redfin forums post on the problems with using VA and FHA loans to finance a short sale.
• Redfin forums post on short sales negotiations.