Email Elizabethsacramento short sale realtor
Natomas Realtor Presents Home for Sale in Riverdale HOA
Clubhouse at Riverdale North is a few blocks away from 3341 Tice Creek Way.
This Natomas Realtor loves the Beazer-built homes in the Riverdale HOA in Sacramento, and so will you. Most of these homes were built from 2006 to 2008, so they are much newer than other parts of Natomas. Not only are they newer, but they are more affordable, with prices ranging in the $220,000 to $270,000 range, depending on square footage, amenities, location and condition. The Riverdale HOA clubhouse is shown above. When I was there shooting photos, I noticed the HOA has just drained the pool.
The seller called this Natomas Realtor because he had hoped to hire one of the top short sale agents in Sacramento. I was happy to oblige and calm his fears about the short sale by letting him know that this Natomas Realtor has sold more short sales over 7 counties than any other agent for the past 10 years. I checked the stats. He cannot possibly hire a Sacramento short sale Realtor with more direct experience than Elizabeth Weintraub. Plus, I have sold my fair share of homes in the Riverdale HOA, including having filmed an HGTV House Hunters 2009 show featuring short sale homes in the Riverdale HOA.
Natomas short sale, 3341 Tice Creek Way, is for sale at $225K.
You really can’t beat the price of $225,000 for this home in Natomas at 3341 Tice Creek Way. Another home of identical square footage recently sold at $238,000. The reason this price is so low is because there is no carpeting on the lower level. With the exception of the ceramic tiled entry, the flooring is slab and the carpeting has been removed. This will make it easy for a new buyer to install the type of flooring everybody wants, which is engineered hardwood.
It’s a perfect home for a first-time home buyer or an investor. Rents are sometimes higher than mortgage payments in this neck of the woods, which means a first-time home buyer might actually be saving money to buy this home over renting it. And an investor might also gain a bit of cash flow, which is the cornerstone of most investments.
Kitchen features maple cabinets and ceramic counters
It features an open kitchen and family room on the first level, plus a half bath. The garage is attached. There are ceramic counters in the kitchen, maple cabinets, a built-in dishwasher, microwave, gas cooking range, separate oven and a free-standing refrigerator. At the top of the stairs on the second floor you’ll find a built-in office area, with a desk and cabinets. There is a second bedroom in the hall, plus a full hall bath, including a master suite with a full bath featuring a tub with a shower.
3341 Tice Creek Way, Sacramento, CA 95833 is offered exclusively by your Natomas Realtor Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate at $225,000. It will be held open this Sunday, October 23, 2016, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM, hosted by the incredible Josh Amolsch from the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. Call 916.233.6759 for more information.
How to Sell a Short Sale With a Tax Lien
You can short sale a home with state or federal tax liens.
We just closed a short sale with a tax lien in Elk Grove. Tax liens are not a new thing; often when people fall into financial troubles, they end up owing the Franchise Tax Board (California state taxes) along with the usual suspect, the I.R.S. If things are so rough that you can’t make your mortgage payment, you probably can’t pay the I.R.S either. When you don’t pay the government, federal or state, the government files a tax lien against you, which is recorded in the public records of the county where you own property.
The interesting fact about personal income tax liens is a seller can sell a short sale with a tax lien because they can be released during the short sale. Ordinarily, you can’t close a short sale with outstanding liens in the public records because the buyer’s lender would object and refuse to close. It’s tough enough getting the short sale banks to understand that the personal income tax liens can be released to allow the short sale. The bank negotiators sometimes demand the tax lien be released before they will issue the short sale approval letter, which is ridiculous and impossible, so we just escalate the issue up the ranks until we find a more intelligent person to deal with.
Doing a Short Sale With a Tax Lien
The reason the government will release the tax liens is because there is no equity in the home to pay the IRS and / or Franchise Tax Board. You can’t squeeze blood out of a beet. However, it is gaining the cooperation of these government entities that is the chore. In Sacramento short sales, we deal with personal income tax liens quite a bit. Last year, it was easier to obtain the tax lien release. We could call the IRS, cry and beg, and some kind person would take pity on us and send the tax lien release. This year it’s been tougher.
The IRS office in Oakland disconnected its phone recently and said we are no longer allowed to call. We can’t email either. Everything has to be communicated through the ancient ritual of faxing. What’s next — smoke signals? Their paperwork states they won’t begin to consider a tax lien release until we have the short sale approval letter. In the event of two lenders, like this last Elk Grove short sale, we needed both letters. And then the IRS can take 60 days. Which means one if not both of the short sale approval letters will expire.
Ocwen made us start over from scratch on this last short sale with a tax lien. It took almost 6 weeks to issue the new approval letter. We recorded the day before the tax lien release expired. By the hair of our chinny-chin-chin. We received the final approval with 6 days to go before the tax lien release expired. The investor buyer had been waiting since October and had already spent his capital on other properties. He didn’t know if he could find the cash now. Well, guess what? Deposit funds or, if we have to start over from the very beginning, we won’t sell to him. He found the cash, and we closed.
And now for my commercial . . . if you need a Sacramento Short Sale Agent with extensive short sale expertise, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. Don’t leave yourself vulnerable.
A Ditech Short Sale in Elk Grove That Seterus Tried to Hijack
Green Tree short sales are now Ditech short sales and not any easier.
In case you don’t know, Green Tree short sales are no more, and the company name has changed to Ditech. I predict this is not the last Ditech short sale I will see. Many real estate agents in Sacramento discovered Ditech when their borrowers dumped our local lenders and opted in for a sparkly shiny new mortgage company they found online, which on many occasions could not perform. I personally recall having several transactions held up because the Ditech mortgage guys were not familiar with our local appraisers nor how we do business in Sacramento, and it caused complications. Hopefully they are better now, but I haven’t run into a mortgage through Ditech for years.
This is a story of a short sale in Elk Grove that has so many bizarre twists, I hardly know where to start, so I will start at the beginning. I listed this home in November of 2014 and it took us 4 months to get an offer anywhere near the comparable sales. We received 4 or 5 offers, all around 80% of market value, which banks don’t take. I’ve been selling short sales for 10 years and have closed more short sales than any other agent in a 7-county area of Sacramento. That makes me the top short sale Realtor for Sacramento. I don’t know if it’s the buyer’s agents or the buyers themselves who don’t understand how short sales work, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I know better than to throw lowball offers at the bank and hope they will stick.
One Sacramento agent even admitted that’s his method of operation. Throwing crap at the wall to see if it sticks. He says he always takes the first lowball and sends it to the bank and then when it’s rejected, he know how much the bank wants, so he changes the price and puts the home back on the market. That seems so defeatist to me. Why not do your homework that you’re trained and paid to do, figure out market value (based on condition) and sell the home ONCE? That makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?
We sent the offer and HUD to the first lender, which was good old’ Seterus, and the investor was Fannie Mae. In reviewing the file now, I see we received the payoff from Seterus a few days after we received the short sale approval letter, although the payoff was dated the day prior to the approval letter. This tells me that Seterus knew how much it was owed. Instead, it sent a short sale approval letter for $100,000 more than its payoff. Seriously. If it was owed $155,000, for example, it approved the short sale by accepting $255,000. If this makes your head hurt, it’s because the first mortgage was NOT short. I guess Seterus just found a way to collect an additional $100K or they can’t read, and I’d hate to think they can’t read their own payoff statements.
The seller had owned this property for more than 15 years. There were many refinances and a subordination refinance in the public records. The seller hadn’t made a payment in so long that we had no mortgage statements, and although requested from Seterus, we did not receive the payoff until after the short sale approval was issued. There was no way we could have accurately predicted the payoff was so low as to not make this a short sale unless we prematurely paid for a prelim, which we don’t do, and even then, we still need the beneficiary statement.
We told Seterus no thank you to the short sale and proceeded with Green Tree, which held the second loan. It took Green Tree from February to the end of July to issue the approval letter and it bumped up the price by $10,000, during which time the company morphed into Ditech and this became a Ditech short sale. Then, the buyer’s appraisal came in $10,000 less, right where the price should have been in the first place, which was the price we had originally submitted. We spent another month obtaining a revised approval from Ditech.
The Elk Grove short sale closed this week. This has been almost a year of hell for the seller but we got it done. The buyer waited almost 9 months to buy this Elk Grove short sale. They could have had a baby in that time. This is another reason to only sell the home once and to sell it to a committed buyer, if at all possible. And a listing agent’s odds and seller’s odds are increased if the buyer is willing to pay market value.
In closing, it’s interesting to note that Green Tree was fined $63 million for abusing customers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC went after Green Tree for its deceptive business practices and harassment of borrowers. No joke, some of those negotiators at Green Tree would scream at us over the phone and threaten to cancel the short sale if we didn’t drop what we were doing and send in documents. My clients hated Green Tree with a passion. And now, they are Ditech.
Put Sacramento Short Sales on the Market Prior to Default Notice
A Notice of Default filing starts the clock ticking on Sacramento short sales. © big stock photo
Unlike the hey days of pre-2012 in Sacramento, we are not seeing a lot of short sales in the area anymore. About 4% of all the listings in Sacramento County at the moment are active short sales, as compared to about 75% a while back. Having a small percentage of homes for sale that are underwater is good news for just about everybody, though, except that short sale seller who needs to sell her home.
In case you’re wondering, and I suspect you probably are, my own caseload of short sales has dramatically decreased, but I still manage to sell and negotiate a large number of Sacramento short sales. I thought the number was much smaller than it is, but so far this year almost 1 out of every 4 sales I’ve closed has been a short sale. It means I am still pulling in a huge chunk of the short sale business and most likely continue to rank as the best Sacramento short sale agent in town.
Even though this month my closed sales for the month of July should top $6 million, only two of those homes were short sales, and they were small price tags. It is possible that July could be my biggest month this year. One of those two sales, though, was a real struggle in West Sacramento. The main problem was the dog urine smell in the back bedroom, compounded by additional problems: a rotting pergola that needed to be removed, additional pest work that was required and a broken HVAC. Not exactly every home buyer’s dream home.
On top of this, as expected, Bank of America had threatened to release the servicing, and the investor Fannie Mae demanded a higher sales price, which I challenged because it was incredibly out-of-line. It would not appraise for the buyer’s lender. Fannie Mae agreed to reduce the sales price but it was still higher than the buyer wanted to pay, but not so high another buyer wouldn’t pay it. That’s often the secret to these negotiations.
However, the sad news is other short sales are lingering, even priced way below the comparable sales, they sit. Buyers are passing by those listings in favor of fast closings and sellers who will make repairs. Some short sales take 3 months to sell today. That’s not good news if a seller has a Notice of Default filed already.
Why a Lowball Offer on a Preapproved Short Sale Price is Silly
A preapproved short sale price means exactly what you think it does
Every so often I get phone calls from investors who ask if my sellers will consider submitting a lowball offer to the bank for a preapproved Sacramento short sale. They realize the bank has preapproved the price but they expect to negotiate with the bank. For a hamburger today I will gladly pay you on Tuesday. They don’t understand that a preapproved short sale price means the bank will agree to sell at that price, versus, let’s say, a much higher price.
These are the kind of yo-yos who are probably used to dealing with a list price on an REO and they have little working knowledge of a short sale. If I say we’ll sell a home to them for a $1.00, they want to pay 50 cents. It doesn’t matter what the price is, they don’t want to pay it. They are giant time sucks. If you don’t want to offer the preapproved short sale price, I say go make somebody else’s life miserable and leave us alone.
Some go so far as to complain about the days on market. It’s been for sale for months now so the bank will definitely take less now — it ain’t gonna happen that way. The bank doesn’t have the property for sale. It’s not the bank’s property. The bank is not required to agree to a short sale. If the bank is agreeable to the short sale, the bank expects a certain amount of money, and if takes months to get it, so what? The bank doesn’t have a timeframe unless there is Notice of Default filed and, in that event, sometimes the bank WANTS the home to go to foreclosure.
Buyers have no idea what goes through the minds of bankers nor the policy guidelines from certain lenders for preapproved short sale prices. If the home doesn’t sell, it might not be price. It could be marketing, it could be condition of the home, showing difficulties or a bad location, all sorts of reasons. A buyer should not automatically assume how a bank looks at the days on market.
But then I’m basically talking to the wall. Over my last decade of negotiating hundreds of short sales in Sacramento as a top short sale specialist, I’ve learned that no matter how long it takes, a buyer will pay what the bank wants. It’s easier to wait for the right buyer than to try to pound a square peg into a round hole. Besides, I don’t work for the buyer. It’s not my lot in life to try to do favors for a buyer who is not my client. And most of the time, the banks are very reasonable about the preapproved short sale price.
