Monday, September 3rd, 2012    by attorney Chris Hacker

I’ve been negotiating short sales for almost seven years now. Many things about the short sale process have changed over that time.

• Lenders and servicers have implemented multiple different systems for tracking files and documents.
• State and Federal laws and programs have been proposed, passed, and implemented.
• The average time for a short sale to be approved and closed has shortened at some banks and lengthened at others compared to seven years ago.

But the top complaints buyers, sellers, and their agents have about short sales has remained unchanged – “Short sales take too long” and “Short sales take too much time”. Do short sales really have to “take too long” or “too much time”? No.

Easy to say, sure. Stay with me for a minute. For starters, these are two different things:

• Too long = duration of the process, as in “Short sales take 4 to 6 months to complete.”
• Too much time = hours invested in making the process move, as in “I spent 100 hours on this short sale before it was approved.”

Short sales do not have to be ‘too long’ nor ‘take too much time.’ There are a couple of things that you can do as a real estate professional to limit these complaints.

Too Long

The number one controllable reason that short sales take too long is documents. Lenders and servicers always want updated financials from sellers. After the second request, sellers often become annoyed and become less responsive. Delays begin. Delays can lead to files being closed by the lender. More delays. In our experience these delays can account for up to 25% of the time it takes to get a file done. That’s one month or four weeks. Speed up the document turn around, eliminate ‘too long’. That’s what we built myShortTrack to do for us. It can do it for you too.

Too Much

Short sales take too much time because of all of the attention that the other people in the transaction often demand. Sellers and buyers want to know what’s happening, every day. Buyer’s agents calling for updates. Emailing for updates. Seller’s calling and emailing for updates. And until they talk to you or get an email from you, they don’t know what’s going on. You have to contact each of them manually. That takes time, your time. When you’re chasing documents for the lender, you are sending emails and making phone calls to remind people to get them to you. That takes your time too. As a professional, with more than one listing, you cannot afford to spend all that time; yet you can’t afford not to contact and remind your clients of what they need to do. What if you could eliminate making 3 out of 4 calls and emails, throughout the process? Short sales would start to be managable. That’s what myShortTrack does.

Take Control

Short sales don’t have to take too long and they certainly don’t have to take too much time. They will never be simple and easy. But you can have a life again, and still participate in this part of the real estate market. You don’t have to turn over control to someone else so that it can get done; myShortTrack will walk you through the process for each and every one of your listings while reducing the labor required to get it done. But if you want to have someone else manage it for you daily, you can give someone else the reigns without losing the benefits of having your clients and other professionals view information directly and put requested documents direclty into the file without you having to touch them.

What’s that flexibility worth to you?