Real Estate Pro's

Today’s Real Estate topic doubles as a rant AND a tip for buyers looking to score a deal on a bank owned or REO listed property – A conservative estimate would be about 98% of the current buyers out there…

To keep this rant reasonable, let’s keep things simple:

Most of the banks that own property are located in a different state and have never been inside of your future dream home. As such, they have a limited abililty to provide disclosure. I know it sucks, but this is the risk you take in scoring a deal and further driving down the property value of the “real/traditional” seller down the street who just wants to sell their home to move to a better school district for their kids. Yeah, yeah, I’m not exactly a bleeding heart, but keep in mind that “every action has an equal and opposite…” This applies to the Real Estate market as much as the physics class room.

Ok, back to the point. Because of limited property knowledge, these banks hire expensive lawyers to draft contracts that protect them against every conceivable outcome. These contracts usually state about ten thousand times that they will not make repairs, they will not pay for repairs, they do not know what “repair” means, they cannot spell repiar…of course I am exaggerating (a little), but you get the idea.

Oh and one more thing. These “great buys”, guess what? You aren’t the only one that thinks this will be their dream home for years to come. Yup, there are probably five other offers…and they are probably within a couple thousand dollars of your offer. If you are in escrow, that means that you won the battle – but not the war.

Let’s add this up:

You want the bank to make a ton of repairs to your “Great Buy”
The bank doesn’t care
There are tons of other people who want the house

Did you come up with the proper answer? Yes, exactly. The buyer requesting all of this hoopla gets squat. Escrow is cancelled and the bank simply goes into escrow with the next best buyer who still wants the “Great Buy” without the stupidity of inane requests.

So, stop wasting every body’s time with absurd requests and simply deal with reality. If you want to score a great buy, there is risk involved. If you want your cake and to eat it too, then maybe you can find a house offered under traditional sale with a compassionate seller willing to leave behind their cherished memories as you build new ones. We can discuss that pipe-dream in a future post…

I hope this was entertaining and informative. Of course, reality lies somewhere in the hazy summer fog, but with a bit of understanding of where everyone is coming from you won’t have your dreams crushed by a mean Realtor like me