We Tell it Like It Is

I have a town home that is currently a short sale listing of mine. My seller had purchased it brand new back in 05. Not long after that, she met Mr. Wonderful & got married. The new hubby, however, also had a home and it was bigger than hers. They decided his home would be the better place for them to reside and they decided they would rent out her town home. However, after doing some investigating, they realized that the loan she had used to purchase the town home had forbid her from renting it; she had signed something at the closing that said she agreed to use the town home as her primary residence and had totally forgotten about it.

As time went on, they started getting behind on their mortgage payments and I entered the picture. The current market value of the town home was $50,000 less than what she had paid for it, so we listed it short of what she owed. We hoped that a buyer would come in and make an offer and we hoped her lender would understand the current market decline and accept the offer and not foreclose.

Recently, we received an offer from a buyer. We submitted the offer to my seller's lender and the lender accepted it. However, my seller has now been behind on her monthly association dues as well as her mortgage payments. She owes the association about $800 but does not have the $ to pay it. The lender says they will not use the proceeds of the sale to pay off the association. The association says they will not forgive my seller's debt to them and in fact, have been threatening to put a lien on the property. If  a lien is put on the property, it will complicate matters much worse and my seller will be out a ton of $ paying a lawyer to help them get this lien removed. Somehow, this $800 needs to get paid before we can sell the town house. We've begged the association to allow my seller to pay them back in small increments and they have refused to compromise. We've begged the lender to help us pay for the $800 and they have refused to help.

Finally, the buyer agreed to pay the balance themselves at closing. Yay! Let's see if this works out. We are now waiting to get signatures back from the lender officially accepting the offer & allowing this sale to take place. The buyer will then need to review the assoc. documents & approve them as well as have their own home inspection done to make sure its in the condition they'd like it to be in. Stay tuned...