subject: When A Buyer Walks Away - Short Sale Education [print this page] The short sale process is lengthy, and each day that goes by gives a potential buyer an opportunity to back out of the transaction, to look for another property, to have their personal circumstances change affecting their ability to qualify for a loan. When the buyer walks, you may see weeks or months of effort being potentially wasted. If there is a scheduled trustee sale, you are now faced with a difficult situation of finding another buyer before the home is foreclosed.
The buyer may have walked for any number of reasons, and while you may be upset for the tremendous waste of your time and energy, the best use would be to focus your efforts on finding a backup buyer or even persuading the lenders to allow you more time to market the property. Best practices that will help to minimize the number of transactions where a buyer walks include:
Pre-Qualify your buyers, making sure that they have the patience to wait for the lenders to complete their Short Sale Secrets approval process, as well as the financial qualifications to purchase the home. Short sale applications can take several months of work before an approval letter is granted. While marketing the property, inform potential buyers of the time frame to expect, and only take offers from buyers who will agree to remain committed to the transaction until the lenders makes their final decision.
Continue to market the property, and take other offers in backup position. If multiple offers are received, submit the superior offer, and ask those that remain if they would like to keep their contract in backup position. In the beginning of this section, we covered the many reasons why a buyer may elect to cancel the transaction, and this action opens the door for a backup buyer to be reviewed by the lienholders. Even if an offer is currently being reviewed, you may still continue to market the property and accept backup offers.
Communicate regularly with your Buyers. One of the main reasons buyers walk away is that they are not kept informed of the progress of a short sale transaction, and make the assumption that the process is going nowhere, and seeks to purchase another property. We utilize an online project management system where all of the milestones, and communication with the lenders are recorded. This system is available to both the listing agent and buyers agent, and the information that we log is critical for letting the buyer know that the application is progressing, and that there is a realistic chance for them to receive an approval letter.
Look out for our future blogs/articles from our Short Sale Leadership Series content.To view our blog updates, visit www.whbsolutions.com/blog.
