My Military Short Sale (Step1&2)

[lilvonne26]

I thought I would come on here and give everybody a play by play of MY military short sale. (Just a note this is my process and what is working and not working for me. I am not an expert but I am learning along the way and provide suggestions based off of what my realtor is advising us to do and what our experience with our lender is.) 11 September got notified of a pending assignment from NEVADA to TEXAS bought our home in 2006 for 269,000 original price was 315,000 current value of our home is 136,000 which makes us aprox 118,000 upside down on our mortagage we knew we were going to short sale the only questions is which program should we use.

 

Right now we have 2 viable options

1. HAP or Home owners assistance program http://hap.usace.army.mil/Update-2012-03-06.html

2. Regular Short Sale

Renting our property out is not an option for us because we would not be able to make our current and future payments and be able to pay a property manager to maintain our property so this leaves us with just two options.

Step 1 Notify your first shirt and your security manager you intend to do a short sale. It is imperative that you let your chain know of what you are about to do so that if they get any phone calls or e-mail they will be well aware of your situation.

Step 2 Interview realtors, we interviewed 2 one through USAA Homebuyers program, and the second through a friend. We asked both realtors a series of questions.

1. How many MILITARY short sales have you done in the past six months (the reason the time frame is so short is because the HAP program started in March of 2012 and we need to make sure they understand the rules)

2. Will we have to miss payments? (We don't want to compromise our security clearances or hurt our credit scores even more by missing payments)

3. Can we sell the house in our allotted time frame? (we don't want to be put out of our house prior to 28 December, we have small children)

4. Will we have to pay ANYTHING out of pocket?

5. How long will the short sale stay on our credit reports?

After asking these questions we chose the realtor not related to the USAA homebuyer program. The reason being is that the realtor they provided indicated we would have to miss a couple of payments, and she could not tell us how long it would affect our credit. The second realtor also understood the military laws regarding missing payments and knew the in's and out's of the military process. In addition He is a smaller company and we didn't feel like one of a million. I will not put the names of the realtors on blast on here but if you want to know who and what companies they are I can provide them to you via PM..

Edited September 25, 2012 by lilvonne26

[lilvonne26]

I thought I would come on here and give everybody a play by play of MY military short sale. (Just a note this is my process and what is working and not working for me. I am not an expert but I am learning along the way and provide suggestions based off of what my realtor is advising us to do and what our experience with our lender is.) 11 September got notified of a pending assignment from NEVADA to TEXAS bought our home in 2006 for 269,000 original price was 315,000 current value of our home is 136,000 which makes us aprox 118,000 upside down on our mortagage we knew we were going to short sale the only questions is which program should we use.

 

Right now we have 2 viable options

1. HAP or Home owners assistance program http://hap.usace.army.mil/Update-2012-03-06.html

2. Regular Short Sale

Renting our property out is not an option for us because we would not be able to make our current and future payments and be able to pay a property manager to maintain our property so this leaves us with just two options.

Step 1 Notify your first shirt and your security manager you intend to do a short sale. It is imperative that you let your chain know of what you are about to do so that if they get any phone calls or e-mail they will be well aware of your situation.

Step 2 Interview realtors, we interviewed 2 one through USAA Homebuyers program, and the second through a friend. We asked both realtors a series of questions.

1. How many MILITARY short sales have you done in the past six months (the reason the time frame is so short is because the HAP program started in March of 2012 and we need to make sure they understand the rules)

2. Will we have to miss payments? (We don't want to compromise our security clearances or hurt our credit scores even more by missing payments)

3. Can we sell the house in our allotted time frame? (we don't want to be put out of our house prior to 28 December, we have small children)

4. Will we have to pay ANYTHING out of pocket?

5. How long will the short sale stay on our credit reports?

After asking these questions we chose the realtor not related to the USAA homebuyer program. The reason being is that the realtor they provided indicated we would have to miss a couple of payments, and she could not tell us how long it would affect our credit. The second realtor also understood the military laws regarding missing payments and knew the in's and out's of the military process. In addition He is a smaller company and we didn't feel like one of a million. I will not put the names of the realtors on blast on here but if you want to know who and what companies they are I can provide them to you via PM..

 

CHOOSING A REALTOR!

This is very important so I thought I would expound on this. Please pick someone who understands how the military works. They need to be sensitive and understand YOUR time frame, this is going to take some work we were very fourtunate to have a realtor fall into our laps via word of mouth. I would advise you to ask around from other people who are PCSing out or who just came in who they picked to handle their sale or buying process. The first realtor we interviewed Lets call her Ms. Cold (yes its a reference to the company), was very aggressive, which don't get me wrong is a good thing. However when her aggressiveness dosen't care about you not wanting to have to live in TLF for 90 days, or if she wants you to miss payments, because not missing them will be "more work" for her. Then it's not worth it IMO. Your realtor should work for you, they are getting paid by your lender not by you at a rate of 6% maybe a little less depending on the bank so who care how much work he/she has to do. Our realtor has been very understanding, and sensitive to our situation. Yes I'm female so this is important to me. He understands that I don't want the house shown all the time becuase we have small children, he understands that neither my husband nor I are allowed to miss payments since we are dual military, and he understands that we want to not close on our house until AFTER christmas.

[lilvonne26]

Here is an update... Told my first shirt that I was doing a short sale becuase of our orders. She told me to make sure to get in writing that I won't have to miss any payments to get approved for the short sale. We are still waiting on WF to approve the adendum to allow us to sale, however my property went on the market on the 27th of September and as of today 2 October we have 6 offers and more coming in everyday. We have 4 CASH offers and 2 owner occupied. We are hoping to go with a owner occupied sale... Not trying to make the rich man richer, In the mean time on the credit front. We are tyring to pay off as much revolving debt as possible so that we don't take a hit when all of this hits our credit reports. We are also buying a new car in december, just before closing but after the bank looks at our financial paperwork.

[Fuerza]

Good luck! I'm following your thread, I'm military also. I'm not in your situation but the concern is still there.

[lilvonne26]

Status as of Today, How went on the Market on Thursday of last week we got 8 offers we had to sit down with the realtor and go through and pick one so hubby and I narrowed it down to just two. One investor and one Owner occupied. After much discussion we decided to go wtih the investor. Reason being is that the Owner occupied had their proof of income from a third party investor. Basically people pool their money together and allow someone else to purchase a house on their behalf. The funding could/ or could no go through depending on that third party.

 

The owners who would occupy the propery had no right or say in the loan itself, and could not effectively counter with the bank if necessary. Which means they could drop out at any time. We needed a guarantee! or as much of one as we could get. So we are now in contract for the sale of our house. We are now just waiting on the bank to approve the adendum and the offer from the investor. According to our agent this could take anywhere from 10-21 days. Wells Fargo asked us for our orders so yesterday I provided them with our assignment notifications, and today when I got to work. Ta-Da my orders were ready! so I submitted mine as well. We are still waiting on hubby's orders (he was slow turning his paperwork in due to mission) We are no longer showing our house and life is looking good! Now we just wait on the bank and begin to do other stuff like arrange TMO and what not. in the mean time we are just working on our utlization like I said earlier, Oh and my Realtor is the BEST! what I have learned from him is that

 

1. You should not pay ANYONE upfront for a short sale if you have orders, and 2. they should be keeping you informed, I get e-mails from them at least twice a day with screen shots of the short sale program they are using to upload our stuff with the bank, and as soon as anything changes I KNOW! they are making this very comfortable for us. I thought this was going to be a complete nightmare and it has turned into something nice.

[CreditWorthyAgain]

Hi LV26, was just wondering if you did sell. Please keep us updated.