For those of you lucky people that have not had the pleasure to try to purchase a short sale, I thought of an analogy that would express the pain a buyer feels while waiting for an answer from the bank. So I came up with this. If you are a traveler, you will be able to relate. When you check in for a flight and you learn the news from the lovely lady behind the counter that your flight was over sold, that it is having mechanical problems and the weather is not cooperating for an on time departure, you think to yourself “hmmmm, I might be here for the next few hours waiting”.
So you decide to go to the bar, get yourself a few drinks, then you decide to check back in with the lovely lady at the counter for an update. No new news! So you decide to go have something to eat. Then you go to the restroom, then on to the book store to pick an overpriced Daniel Steel novel for the wife. You come back to check in with the agent an hour later, no new news! Frustrating, absolutely! So now you sit down in a very uncomfortable chair at the gate amongst the rest of your fellow passengers wondering when in God’s Earth you will be able to get on with your trip.
About an hour later, the lovely lady behind the check in desk decides to update the passengers and lets them know that they are getting a different plane that has to be flown in in from a different airport, which happens to be 34 seats smaller than the prior plane. So, they start asking for volunteers to continue to wait and spend a day at the airport. Sound familiar? well, the pain that you feel during this episode is the same pain a buyer of a short sale feels while the waiting game is going on. They wait with excitement for any sort of good news and they wait and they wait and they wait.
Finally they reach a boiling point where the excitement is gone and frustration has taken over, green horns come out, smoke expels from their noses and ears and the transaction is history. It is a nightmare everyone involved wants to forget.
If you are the listing agent of the short sale, it is imperative you keep the buyer and the buyer’s agent informed and communicate any activity on the file, good or bad. Silence and lack of communication keeps a buyer in the dark and frustration sets in. However, if you are the buyer’s agent, you have to keep your buyer engaged in the transaction.
The Short Sale process is not for everyone. It is for the brave of heart. However, patience and persistency could lead you to a tremendous buy.
Your thoguhts?
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Quite an interesting way of comparing two things which are indirectly related to each other, it was good reading your post.