Sagas of a Short Sale.
Life has been so busy lately that I'm too busy living it to write about it.
House Front: We put a bid on a house back in December and are STILL awaiting the seller's bank's acceptance of our bid. They would be crazy not to accept our offer: asking price to include 5K for closing costs. It is a short sale, meaning that they're in pre-foreclosure and trying to sell it before they get evicted. The sellers gain nothing, but getting out of foreclosure. The bank gets to avoid the cost of foreclosing and cuts their losses with the defaulted loan. From my research, it takes nearly 30-40K to foreclose on a property and foreclosed properties can be fairly hard to sell. They end up being trashed and the banks don't do anything to even clean them. Seriously, you should see some of the places we've looked at. Words to be wary of in a listing: "needs a little TLC", "fix-up", "lender owned", "quick possession", "investor property"....."short sale". Short sales notoriously take forever because of all the red tape and the banks are slow - excuse me, "overwhelmed" in this market of foreclosures and short sales. I guess we've been pretty lucky that this bank's response time has been about 3 weeks. BUT that's with every little thing: 3 weeks to acknowledge and request more documents, 3 weeks to process documents and assign a negotiator, 3 weeks to look at the package and forward for final approval.....and that's where we are right now - after 3 contract extensions so that the bank could still move forward. Supposedly this last step will only take 5-7 days. So we should be getting the short sale acceptance and the bank's counter offer the end of this week or early next week. We really did go in with our best offer, just to avoid the back-and-forth. I found the NED (Notice of Election, aka. foreclosure notice publication) and it looks like this guy did an 80/20 loan and, not calculating in the 20% loan, after commissions and such the bank will only come out about 10K short of what's owed on the primary loan still. ...and assuming they made mortgage payments for 4 years before they went into default, they probably have already recovered that cost in interest payments. It could cost the bank another 30K to actually foreclose on the place and then they chance the place being trashed and not being able to find a buyer for it for even what we're offering. So yeah, we've been given the projection of about another week. I've tenatively scheduled the inspection for the 12th and hopefully that won't have to be pushed back, again. I guess that once the bank accepts an offer they like to move fast. So they will probably amend the timeline to close in less than the 45 days that we have mapped out for closing....probably more like 15 days to closing. But it's taken so long for the process to ensue already - did I mention the seller has dragged their feet every step of the way by not being able to sign things in a timely manner and then giving us mere hours to get things signed and faxed back in? Anyways, it's taken so long already that now we'll be able to close pretty quickly.
The house is about 20 years old with a modern look to it that's not quite cookie-cutter. The exterior fits well with what I want to do inside. It's about a cornflower blue, with red brick, white trim and a little porch out front that will be perfect for a chair and small table. It's in a cul-de-sac and has a HUGE yard - 1/4 acre lot. Good thing about a cul-de-sac: not so much traffic. Downside: not so much parking. The neighbor parks his red truck sticking out into the cul-de-sac instead of parrallel parking it. The back yard badly needs TLC, but doesn't everything in Colorado. It has a sprinkler system, so hopefully it won't be too much work to get grass to grow. It definitely isn't the worst yard we've seen. Inside it has a fairly open floor plan with a vaulted ceiling. It's a 4-level split floor plan: main floor is the formal living room, kitchen and dining room; go down a few steps to the family room, half bath with W/D, and the door to the garage; go downstairs from there to the 338 sf basement; upstairs from the main floor is the bedrooms.
As soon as we get the keys we'll be picking out paint, carpet & flooring. I'd like to paint all the walls & ceilings a light tan color, add a few accent walls and white trim / crown molding throughout. We would like to put some kind of wood floors on the entire main level...anything but linoleum. Carpet will depend on what we choose for wood floors & paint, but we'd like to recarpet the bedrooms, family room and basement. The banisters will need to be resecured (eventually replaced). It's likely that we'll need to replace some piping on the water heater downstairs. Last time we were there, they were doing laundry and it was leaking where they had connected PVC & copper pipes. We'd like to put a small wall in the basement to seperate out a habitatable area from "storage" and put in some kind of a ceiling. The walls are already done and there's a conforming (2 maybe?) window down there already. We will need to install an A/C unit. It has forced air and even a humidifier on the furnace, but for some reason the A/C has been removed. The deck out back needs to be refinished and needs a banister all the way around. They built the deck over one of the conforming windows and left a hole there, so we'll need to somehow secure the grate for that and put a little ladder in. ...and that's our list so far. Most of the stuff we'll be able to do on our own - with lots of babysitter time, of course.
We hope to close the end of this month or about mid-March. That will give us 6-8 weeks to get stuff done and move out of our apartment. :D
*LOL* I meant to post pictures from December today, not go into a great big spiel about the house. So I guess I'll post a couple pictures from the Parade of Lights. It was a warm night, so everyone and their brother's kids showed up...making it nealry impossible to see even though we were only about 10 feet back from the street. We let Blake sit on our shoulders so that at least he could see.
Taking pictures of lights at night is the hardest technical skill for me - photography wise. Of course, having a mid-grade digital camera doesn't make it much easier. Exposure and shutter speeds are so wonky on digitals. I'm afraid to try out a fancy one that could actually do what I want it to...afraid that I could never go back to a camera that costed less than 3K. I guess I'll just have to start using the SLR when we do these kinds of things and *gasp* bring film in to be processed.
I also need to take a class or ready a Photoshop for Dummies book so that I can learn all the cool tricks that my Photoshop does.
House Front: We put a bid on a house back in December and are STILL awaiting the seller's bank's acceptance of our bid. They would be crazy not to accept our offer: asking price to include 5K for closing costs. It is a short sale, meaning that they're in pre-foreclosure and trying to sell it before they get evicted. The sellers gain nothing, but getting out of foreclosure. The bank gets to avoid the cost of foreclosing and cuts their losses with the defaulted loan. From my research, it takes nearly 30-40K to foreclose on a property and foreclosed properties can be fairly hard to sell. They end up being trashed and the banks don't do anything to even clean them. Seriously, you should see some of the places we've looked at. Words to be wary of in a listing: "needs a little TLC", "fix-up", "lender owned", "quick possession", "investor property"....."short sale". Short sales notoriously take forever because of all the red tape and the banks are slow - excuse me, "overwhelmed" in this market of foreclosures and short sales. I guess we've been pretty lucky that this bank's response time has been about 3 weeks. BUT that's with every little thing: 3 weeks to acknowledge and request more documents, 3 weeks to process documents and assign a negotiator, 3 weeks to look at the package and forward for final approval.....and that's where we are right now - after 3 contract extensions so that the bank could still move forward. Supposedly this last step will only take 5-7 days. So we should be getting the short sale acceptance and the bank's counter offer the end of this week or early next week. We really did go in with our best offer, just to avoid the back-and-forth. I found the NED (Notice of Election, aka. foreclosure notice publication) and it looks like this guy did an 80/20 loan and, not calculating in the 20% loan, after commissions and such the bank will only come out about 10K short of what's owed on the primary loan still. ...and assuming they made mortgage payments for 4 years before they went into default, they probably have already recovered that cost in interest payments. It could cost the bank another 30K to actually foreclose on the place and then they chance the place being trashed and not being able to find a buyer for it for even what we're offering. So yeah, we've been given the projection of about another week. I've tenatively scheduled the inspection for the 12th and hopefully that won't have to be pushed back, again. I guess that once the bank accepts an offer they like to move fast. So they will probably amend the timeline to close in less than the 45 days that we have mapped out for closing....probably more like 15 days to closing. But it's taken so long for the process to ensue already - did I mention the seller has dragged their feet every step of the way by not being able to sign things in a timely manner and then giving us mere hours to get things signed and faxed back in? Anyways, it's taken so long already that now we'll be able to close pretty quickly.
The house is about 20 years old with a modern look to it that's not quite cookie-cutter. The exterior fits well with what I want to do inside. It's about a cornflower blue, with red brick, white trim and a little porch out front that will be perfect for a chair and small table. It's in a cul-de-sac and has a HUGE yard - 1/4 acre lot. Good thing about a cul-de-sac: not so much traffic. Downside: not so much parking. The neighbor parks his red truck sticking out into the cul-de-sac instead of parrallel parking it. The back yard badly needs TLC, but doesn't everything in Colorado. It has a sprinkler system, so hopefully it won't be too much work to get grass to grow. It definitely isn't the worst yard we've seen. Inside it has a fairly open floor plan with a vaulted ceiling. It's a 4-level split floor plan: main floor is the formal living room, kitchen and dining room; go down a few steps to the family room, half bath with W/D, and the door to the garage; go downstairs from there to the 338 sf basement; upstairs from the main floor is the bedrooms.
As soon as we get the keys we'll be picking out paint, carpet & flooring. I'd like to paint all the walls & ceilings a light tan color, add a few accent walls and white trim / crown molding throughout. We would like to put some kind of wood floors on the entire main level...anything but linoleum. Carpet will depend on what we choose for wood floors & paint, but we'd like to recarpet the bedrooms, family room and basement. The banisters will need to be resecured (eventually replaced). It's likely that we'll need to replace some piping on the water heater downstairs. Last time we were there, they were doing laundry and it was leaking where they had connected PVC & copper pipes. We'd like to put a small wall in the basement to seperate out a habitatable area from "storage" and put in some kind of a ceiling. The walls are already done and there's a conforming (2 maybe?) window down there already. We will need to install an A/C unit. It has forced air and even a humidifier on the furnace, but for some reason the A/C has been removed. The deck out back needs to be refinished and needs a banister all the way around. They built the deck over one of the conforming windows and left a hole there, so we'll need to somehow secure the grate for that and put a little ladder in. ...and that's our list so far. Most of the stuff we'll be able to do on our own - with lots of babysitter time, of course.
We hope to close the end of this month or about mid-March. That will give us 6-8 weeks to get stuff done and move out of our apartment. :D
*LOL* I meant to post pictures from December today, not go into a great big spiel about the house. So I guess I'll post a couple pictures from the Parade of Lights. It was a warm night, so everyone and their brother's kids showed up...making it nealry impossible to see even though we were only about 10 feet back from the street. We let Blake sit on our shoulders so that at least he could see.
Taking pictures of lights at night is the hardest technical skill for me - photography wise. Of course, having a mid-grade digital camera doesn't make it much easier. Exposure and shutter speeds are so wonky on digitals. I'm afraid to try out a fancy one that could actually do what I want it to...afraid that I could never go back to a camera that costed less than 3K. I guess I'll just have to start using the SLR when we do these kinds of things and *gasp* bring film in to be processed.
I also need to take a class or ready a Photoshop for Dummies book so that I can learn all the cool tricks that my Photoshop does.