As a buyer with an offer on a short sale home, it can be difficult to wait for the process. What you need to do as a buyer and what you can do to speed up the process. As a buyer you can’t really rush the process, agree to make sure your agent stays in touch with the listing agent for updates on a regular basis.
Under Arizona regulation, only a signed offer can be delivered to the bank for consideration for acceptance. Agents have found a few ways to get around this and one is to have all buyers sign a multiple counter offer form and let all buyers know that multiple offers will be sent to the bank and the contract will not be fully executed. As a buyer I would suggest staying away from these. You could literally wait for months to find out that you had little to no chance of getting the house since your offer was not the highest or best offer and you waited a long time to get anything in the end.
For the most part, a good listing agent only gets one offer sent to the bank for consideration. Let’s say that’s your offer, now what? Depending on many variables, the process could be as short as one month or as long as six or seven months. Find out how many loans are on the property, one loan is optimal as it takes much longer to get more than one bank to agree to the terms and can therefore delay the process. Then depending on which bank is involved, it makes a world of difference because the bigger banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chase have a lot of short sales on their books and it takes a while to even go through the file let alone for the next steps. involved.
Once in the hands of a negotiator, that person will need to apply for a BPO, which is similar to a full appraisal to get home value in that particular area and condition of the home. After receiving that, they have a process for looking at the sellers’ records, such as income, debts, tax returns, and how much is currently owed on the property, which can take quite a while to review.
Often times, a buyer will wait several months and then decide to move to another property to purchase and then another offer must be received. Unfortunately, this slows down the process a bit, as the final result of the new offer may differ from the first one available.
If you have an offer for a short sale, understand that there is nothing real estate agents can do to speed it up. It’s a process that will hopefully be shortened with additional staff and expertise from the banks.
