Short Sales made up a total of 22 percent of the real estate market in 2012, signaling their importance to the stabilizing of the industry and the willingness of banks and lenders to utilize them.
While the housing market has shown signs of recovery over the past year, there are still at least 10 million underwater homeowners who are looking for a way out. Thankfully, a recent announcement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be just what these homeowners were hoping for.
It is an unfortunately common scenario. First-time auctioneers or those inexperienced with the process buy out an HOA foreclosure, not knowing that a much larger bank foreclosure is looming over the property. Quite often, the banks will not hesitate to foreclose on the new owners in a startlingly short amount of time.
With the Federal Reserve’s announcement to invest in home loans last week, mortgage rates across the nation fell sharply, reaching some of the lowest levels ever seen and bringing in a new wave of opportunity for those currently looking at homes.
RealtyTrac reported that July was the third month in a row where figures showed an increase of foreclosure rates. This has been an unfortunate reversal in what had been up till then a year of steady decreases.
In regards to the recent changes, most of them have been done to help further ease the process for owners, as well as open up the program to more people. A full list of all of the changes can be found at the program’s web site, but we since we receive a lot of questions on the subject, we thought we’d highlight some of the biggest.
Short sales were at a record three-year high this past quarter, with a growth of 25 percent over the last year. The Associated Press reported that short sales “make up the vast majority of homes sold while still in the foreclosure process.”
Zillow’s Negative Equity Report found that approximately 15.7 million U.S. homeowners owed more on their homes than what they were currently worth. This averages to about one-third of homeowners in the country.
Why are some analysts saying that 2012 is the year of the short sale? A overwhelming number of upcoming foreclosure filings, level-headed and realistic homeowners, and forecasts of further decline in home value add up to homeowners making a business decision to short sale their home.
You might be writing a hardship letter for any variety of reasons: loan modification, short sale, or several others. This particular article relates to writing a short sale hardship letter, but most of the hardship letter guidelines and certainly the hardship letter sample is useful for almost any type of hardship letter.