Warning: Real Estate Investor Almost Loses $30,000 Because of Short Sales

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees?”

For awhile, I never quite understood this one. I kept hearing it in speeches and seeing it in books though, and come to find out, it refers to the tendency to get caught up in the details and miss seeing the big picture. Well, this is exactly what happened when we first got starting as beginning investors.

We were the type of beginning real estate investor that devoured every piece of information we could get our hands on. Shortly after buying our first couple investment properties, we were looking into more real estate investment buying strategies and caught the short sale bug. Short Sales were one of the hot fresh topics that a bunch of gurus were professing in their books, courses, and CDs. So, we bought a short sale course by Dwan Bent-Twyford. It was a very simple course but was enough to get us started, and ultimately, do our first few short sales.

One of the short sales that we were working on was a house in Hanahan, South Carolina. The seller had a gambling problem and was losing his house to foreclosure. He was very depressed every time I saw or talked to him on the phone. The reason I tell you this is so that you will know the types of people you will be working with. Most people facing foreclosure have gone through some very difficult times so be ready to empathize with them.

Being that we were engrossed in the mindset to short sale anything and everything, we put together a short sale package and commenced negotiations with the bank. If you know anything about short sales, you know that they can take awhile. A couple months passed, a couple offers got rejected, and we hadn’t made measurable progress. The seller was getting harder to contact and restless. He had already accepted that he was going to lose his house and get nothing from the sale.

One day when reviewing the file, I ran the numbers again. It looked like there was chance that there may be enough equity just sitting in the deal if we were to buy it subject to. I ordered reinstatement figures and viola! We had a deal! We were barely able to keep the seller interested in seeing the sale through. Needlessly negotiating with the bank for months almost cost us $30,000.00.

We were so caught up trying to do a short sale that we didn’t notice that it was a deal as-is. All we had to do was close on it!

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Category: Real Estate Investment Buying Strategies