Hi everyone, just wanted share another short sale story (maybe I should say saga, lol). This is for my personal residency and not an investment property.
First I am sure many of you are aware that OneWest Bank has taken over IndyMacs assets. From what I recall reading a few weeks ago they paid 25 cents on the dollar.
Ok so here goes the tale. Five months ago we came across a property that was on a short sale. Short background story was that the people who owned the property were there for over 15 years. Toward the peak of the housing the bubble they refinanced twice (within a few years) based on the inflated price and eventually just couldn't afford the payments. Apparently they had some money issues etc but they actually owned a pretty fair share of the home after living there for so long in comparison to other short sales I have taken part in. The agent mentioned to us that the bank wouldn't be losing much on this house even if it was on a short sale which sounded like a plus to me.
So we checked out the property and they had just moved out of the house. The bank gave them cash for keys. The agent set the BPO at 255k. We bid and so did a few other folks. Our bid was the highest at 250k. The house has potential but needs work. So we sat and waited for 3 months and heard nothing back. Having gone through the short sale motions a few times we found this odd and pressed the agent to get more information. It was run around as usual.
IndyMac finally came back after 4 months and said they thought this house was up for load modification, but would now put it into the correct list. So finally after month 5, they have come back to us and said there appraiser said the house was worth 330k. Needless to say I was like wtf? Did this guy walk inside the house or even look at it from the outside?? The BPO was 260k and there appraiser came back with 330k? 70k difference wow...
Condition:
House on the exterior needs all new siding. The wood siding is falling off in chunks. Living room and kitchen, all new carpeting (Maybe even need new flooring) since there dog went to town (urine). One of the bedrooms has water damage from adjacent bathroom. Another of the rooms is a converted garage (something we planned on removing as the garage doors are still there). And the other major portion of work that I saw was that the first floor cement foundation had a huge crack running the length of the garage floor. Don't know how expensive that last item could cost but I estimated that it would take about 30k to get the place up to near peak potential.
We didn't submit a packet with this short sale, really didn't see the need as the BPO was right along what we felt was the correct price.
I was somewhat left dumbfounded at the end of last week. Why would the bank put the house on the market with an agent and not get an appraisal done first? The spread from the agents BPO to there appraisal isn't close. We just countered and bumped up our bid by 10k but we really aren't sure if this is going to go anywhere considering that to me it seems they want to play hard ball and are probably looking for us to add 35k more into the pot. The pot that no one else is bidding on lol.
Well that is pretty much it in a nutshell. Would love to hear some feedback or suggestion or critiques from the community.
