Yes You Can Be A Hero And Have Your Best Year
“One in 10 homeowners don’t make their mortgage payments.”
“One in six homeowners has a reverse mortgage.”
“Seven out of 10 homeowners who lose their homes to foreclosure did not contact a real estate agent or lender prior to foreclosure.”
These are just some of the statistics I heard at the Short Sales Summit in February in Carlsbad, California.
The guest speaker was Alex Charfen, co-founder of the Distressed Property Institute, who added that, given the current market, “What’s happening is just getting started. If it’s a baseball game, it’s number two or three.”
And while the market today is no game, says Charfen, it’s a “once in a lifetime gold rush” if you become a short selling expert in your area. It doesn’t mean reluctantly “Yeah, okay, I’ll take that short sale,” or desperately “I’ll take that short sale – I’ll take anything!” That doesn’t mean you just add “Short Sales Expert” to your business cards and ads.
That means you’ve spent some serious time acquiring the knowledge to become an expert at helping people who are facing the worst financial crisis (or close to it) in their lives. This means you are looking for a lead in a short sale situation. This means that you advertise the lead, you embrace the prospect, and you are committed to helping them negotiate the best possible outcome.
This means you understand that you are not doing this just for a commission check. You want to sell the house. You want to help the family avoid foreclosure and financial ruin. You want to help not just your clients, but their entire community so it doesn’t turn into a ghost town of abandoned abandoned houses.
Why would I want to do that, you ask? Why not let another agency deal with those people and their problems? Give me a nice two-income family, 720+ FICO, steady job, big down payment, and I’ll find them the perfect home.
Of course you will. That is, if you can find that dream client.
Just not many of them out there. If they’re daydreaming, they’re generally already in a house and they’re not moving up or down or anywhere until the economy is in better shape. It’s this lack of dream clients that drives a record number of real estate agents out of business each month.
So, who’s out there to buy a short sale property? Lots of first time buyers, especially people who rent. Relocating families who have to move. Investors looking to start or expand their portfolio. A short sale is an opportunity to acquire a property at below market value. Read: Plenty for buyers. There are many properties to choose from, and banks would rather sell properties than spend the time and expense of foreclosures (i.e., “They’d rather write off assets that weren’t performing well before being acquired,” as Charfen puts it).
What is truly unfortunate – worse than unfortunate – is the number of people whose homes are foreclosed on when they may have had a successful short sale. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and there’s a lot of people who actually think, “Short sale or foreclosure – the same thing.” So they skip a mortgage payment, and then another and then another, and their lives go downhill at a rapid pace.
It doesn’t have to be that way, Charfen says. Once an agent is armed with training and a support network, “the agent is telling people in his database and others that he’s a short selling expert, he’s available, and he can help sellers sell and buyers buy. He starts helping people, and his happy clients. enthusiastically referred him to their family members, friends and co-workers in similar situations. He was known as a short selling ‘Super Hero’ who not only handled short sales professionally and effectively, but also saved people from foreclosure.”
That doesn’t mean short selling is easy – it isn’t. They require more, and different, paperwork than traditional real estate sales, and one missing piece can delay a transaction for weeks or months — or kill it altogether. Becoming a Super Hero with a short sale requires exceptional negotiation skills as you represent the seller and interact with buyer agents or offers from multiple buyer agents. At various times you may be in contact with attorneys, title persons, property tax persons, contractors, tax advisers, accountants, and others. And then there are the lenders in the form of loss mitigation, the overworked, underappreciated person who already has 300 files on his desk and why should he prioritize yours? No, short selling is not easy. If so, everyone will – right?
There is an incredible opportunity right now for real estate agents who are
o Willing to take the time to be educated about short selling.
o Committed to implementing systems to help manage these complex transactions.
o Want more than just a commission check – you want to help people get the best financial results and get on with their lives.
These agencies will thrive in this market and make 2009 their best year yet.
Would you?