All Forum Posts by: Jamie Cox

Good advice from an investing standpoint Jon however from an agent standpoint I would never recommend my seller (of a short sale) accept an offer with a short deadline. We've actually went the opposite direction and write up a counter to buyer stating their EMD is non refundable for 90 days. This buys us enough time to make progress with the bank. To answer the original question I would recommend finding an agent that's comfortable working with investors. As long as you write up a cancellation on the other properties once one is accepted you should be fine.

There's a lot of people excited about the new HARP program. I don't see how you'd be able to take advantage of this from an investment stand point but it may be worth looking into.

I use www.MyRealEstateTools.com. I believe it's much better than Wise Agent and/or Top Producer and it's cheaper

We have investors that have an established buyer list. They are using transactional funding to actually close on the property and selling it to the end buyer the next day. This is working with REO's and short sales. The key is to negotiate enough margin to cover transaction costs and still have a profit. A few years ago I actually had so many leads of people under water that I ended up getting my real estate license and doing short sales as an agent.

Do not discount Las Vegas. Investors are here from all over the world gobbling up everything they can.

Also Joe - I believe you've posted about "under the table dealings" in Vegas several times. I'd be curious to hear your experience. I haven't had that.

Thanks Joe! A lot of agents have already been hit. Many were calling the fee a document fee, storage fee, transaction fee, etc. This implied the buyer was getting an additional service. They've actually stated the fee is okay if it's called a commision or additional commission. Other agents are using buyer brokerage agreements with a minimum commision. For example: Buyer signs an agreement with a minimum commission of $3000. They purchase a $50k home that has a 3% co-op. The buyer's agent would receive $1500 from the listing brokerage and $1500 from their buyer. (through the brokerage of course)

Hi Chris,

This may be a result of your appraisal. If the appraisor made this a condition of his appraisal WF may have required it in order for the underwriter to give final loan approval.

We had something similar to this about a week ago on a property that was "settling"

Hope that helps.

We keep all of our negotiations in house. I've tried services title companies offer as well as local attorneys. I've found we do a much better job looking out for the seller's best interest since we're the ones that have to look the seller in the face and explain to them why their home foreclosed if we don't do our job.

I have a full time assistant that handles the admin side of the short sale. Faxing, scanning, refaxing, rescanning etc. I handle the actual negotiations with the banks.

Andy - I'm an active agent in Las Vegas and I have to say I agree with Jake's statement that every property should be analysed on it's own. I believe offering $100 over list on every property and 10% under list on every property are both losing strategies. I know this sounds crazy but the list price doesn't mean anything at all. To base your offer on what it's listed at is setting yourself up for failure.

What my team does for all of our investors is pull similar sold properties in the last 60 days to determine what the property is worth. If the investor is purchasing the property for cash flow we also pull rental comps in that same area so we have a good idea what it's going to rent for. Based on the sold comps we can determine where we want to write our offer. In some cases it may be over list and other cases it may be under. If the offer is accepted great, otherwise we move on to the next property.

With the recent passing of AB 284 the number of foreclosure filings has dropped more than 80% therefore the number of new foreclosures coming on the market has slowed drastically. We have less active inventory on the market than we've had for many years. Lower inventory results in more offers on less properties.

Hope that helps.
Jamie

On a side note with the average sale price dropping it's become common for an agents here to charge some sort of fee in addition to the commission paid by the seller. I know some agents that charge as much as $1500.