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Real Estate Market Offering Good Opportunity For Buyers

Real Estate Market Offering Good Opportunity For Buyers

What Home Buyers Want Most in Their New Homes

What Home Buyers Want Most in Their New Homes

Level with Your Realtor; She’s on Your Side

Here’s a story about being up front with your realtor.

I recently listed a home in the Bluegrass neighborhood off of Ebenezer Road in Knoxville. This is a nice home in a nice neighborhood, but the owners were having some problems.

First, they were going through a divorce. Not only is divorce heartbreaking and painful for everyone involved, it also leads to bad financial decisions. In this case, they couldn’t agree on a selling price.

You don’t have to be a realtor to understand that you can’t sell a house without agreeing on a price. I was, in fact, the third realtor to work with this couple, and my first accomplishment was coaxing them into a common strategy. They agreed to take a break-even price so they could go on with their lives. In other words, they wanted to make just enough profit to pay for all the fees associated with the sale.

We nearly did it. We came up with a price that would do the job, and we had a buyer who was willing to pay that price.

But there was another problem that I didn’t know about. My sellers were three months behind on their mortgage, and they had no money to make up the difference at closing. Under the circumstances they couldn’t sell the house.

I don’t know why they didn’t tell me sooner. Maybe they were afraid I didn’t want to hear it. Maybe they were embarrassed. Certainly no one enjoys admitting to financial problems.

But there are things we can do. I sent them back to their lender, where they applied for a short sale program. In a short sale, the lender agrees to take less than the full amount owed; the process saves everyone the time and cost of a foreclosure, while doing less damage to my seller’s credit score.

The process takes time. There is a lot of paperwork involved, and the lender requires a new appraisal and home inspection. In this case, it took nearly two months—two months for a process we should have gotten out of the way long before.

Then, and only then, could we sell the house. We did sell the house, and everyone is reasonably happy. My sellers get to go on with their lives, with a relatively moderate hit to their credit, and the buyer got a good deal on a great house.

For me, the bottom line is this: Please be candid with your realtor. We’re really here to help. We can work with problems, financial and other, but only if we know about them.

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