Walking Away from a Short Sale

Is certainly hard to do!

Just recently I was put in a position that walking away was the best decision and I'm glad I did! 

Bird dog brought me a deal that was his sister house that needed shorted. We started the process and worked it through the best we could. I ended up not getting an approval for an amount that would have not made me any money as well as I was NOT able to get a buyer lined up. I truly believe this was something that ulitimately my fault however I like to blame it on the bird dog because he's such a great scape-goat :)

The bird dog and the seller which again were siblings were instructed to make sure the house was cleaned up and cleaned out. I never been to the house so I can neither confirm nor deny the speculation that it was done is true or false. What I did hear though is that the fire alarm apparently was low on battery so whenever buyers were being walked through, an annoying sound kept going off and I'd like to think that doesn't give the best impression as minor as it might sound. 

The other thing was that the bird dog and seller apparently did NOT clean out the fridge very well so once the electricity was turned off, you can imagine the smell. Not good when you're trying to flip/sell to retail buyers. 

These things were bad and just little things that you have to deal with and put up with when working short sales. The biggest turn off was that once the BPO was ordered, we weren't able to get anyone out there to influence the BPO which is WAY important when you're doing short sales. The BPO came back really high and I was very upset that all these little things were not being done properly and it negatively affected my business. 

You could say and I would agree with you that it comes down to me. The idea though is that I depend on my team and their resposibilties to produce results. The bird dog should have done his job, the listing agent should have done hers and this might have been a better story for myself. 

This is however, NOT about myself. It's about the seller. Fortunately even though nothing was working out very good, Justin, the negotiator I had was still doing the best he could with what he had to work with and was able to get the price down low enough to quickly get it resold to a retail buyer on the sellers behalf. 

Just this morning, the listing agent emailed me and said they had a buyer and it was FHA which wouldn't have worked out for me anyways but more importantly it's an offer to close that up for the seller so she was able to avoid foreclosure and the bird dog has the relief knowing that after all the bumps in the road, his sister will be ok. 

So, moral of the story is, sometimes you have to walk to let the deal happen without you for the sake of the seller. Not to worry though, there are plenty more money makers to come that will make up for that.