Real Estate Short Sales

How Short Sales Can Help Your Credit

A “Short Sale” in Real Estate means that the person paying the mortgage can no longer keep up the payments for some reason, and needs to sell the house for less than what they owe the holder of the mortgage. If you are the homeowner stuck in this miserable situation, it is far better for you to do so, rather than simply waiting and your house being foreclosed.

You should talk to your lender. If the lender agrees to a short sale, then you can advertise your house for sale, or hire a Realtor to help you. You also need a Real Estate Attorney. Selling the house for less than you owe can help you avoid foreclosure, further, more extreme embarrassment, and in some cases, even bad credit reporting about the incident. You have to ask that the lender not make a bad report to the credit bureaus, and not all lenders who accept a short sale will refrain from reporting you to the credit bureaus.

Performing a short sale on your house in these tough times can be difficult. It may even take longer to perform a short sale, so that you have several payments to try to make, or even fall behind on, and you are foreclosed on, anyway. Credit scores are important to hiring managers. Doing nothing about your financial/housing situation will surely earn you bad credit marks. Performing a short sale gives you a much better chance of positive credit marks.

Most Real Estate Sales are Short Sales

If you have seen the news or read a newspaper, or even online lately, then you know the housing market is in just as nasty a slump as employment, if not worse. If you have looked around for houses to buy, you’ve probably seen many “For Sale by Owner” signs in yards, or Realtor signs in yards of occupied houses. These are mostly going to be short sales.

A short sale in Real Estate is when a borrower cannot pay the mortgage for some reason, and the lender agrees to take less money than they owe on the property. Often, you will have to pay Agent fees to the Realtor, pay for termite and other home inspections, but this can still be great news if you are looking to buy a home. The price is often deeply discounted, and today’s interest rates are extremely low, most being under 5% for a 30-year loan.

Many people think buying houses like this as doing the poor borrower a wrong. In reality, they are really helping the borrower avoid horrible credit. In many cases, if a lender has agreed to a short sale, the original borrower can ask that the lender not make any adverse credit report about them to the credit reporting agencies. This is not always a request that is fulfilled, but the borrower can still attach a letter explaining the situation to their credit report. Short sales usually help you both win out.