Short sales are still tough, but getting easier…

J Pepper Frazier Company just successfully brokered and closed another short sale on Nantucket-70 Pochick Avenue. Although I was working on the deal for 6 months, once Chase assigned the case a negotiator, in the sixth month, I was actually able to communicate with someone and move the deal along smoothly, basically as a conventional deal. The lenders are finally putting set systems in place to process these short sales; Chase has a whole team of negotiators that will actually call you, Bank of America uses a system called Equator where one can actually see updates and get instructions for the next step, other lenders have their own processes. None of these systems are perfect, but they are a far cry from how the short sales used to be handled. When the short sales first started appearing on Nantucket, about two years ago, closing the deal was very hard because the lenders had no system in place to handle the deals and many times the property would end up going to foreclosure and be bought at auction for a lesser price than what was offered with the short sale-definitely not in the shareholders’ best interest… The last month of the 70 Pochick Ave. deal was refreshing to see that the lenders are finally stepping to the plate to get the short sales processed. We need the shorts sales and foreclosures out of the marketplace to get back to a healthy market-seems like we are getting closer…