Short Sales Success in Southern Oregon

I have been tracking for close to a year the properties that are listed as short sales in Jackson county.

Short sales for those who don’t know are properties that are for sale that the proceeds of the sale if the seller gets market value are less than what the seller owes on the property.

I was working on short sales for a period of time last year, but came to the conclusion that they were not a very good way for the average buyer to get into a house. While the deals may seem good, one doesn’t really know if the bank will accept the asking price. There is a joke among Realtors that they are not really short sales, but they should be called long sales.

By the time you know if the bank will accept the short, you can have waited for 2 months or even more. One can be in line to buy a  house for months, and have the bank foreclose on it without even responding to the offers.

So I was interested to track what the success rate was for properties that were listed as short sales, and how the asking price to selling price was affected. Of the 379 properties I tracked, roughly 14% of them successfully closed. 44% of them were foreclosed on or came off the market for some other reason.

The average sales to list price was in line with our valley in the high ninety percentile.

So if you are looking to buy a short sale, you should know that the success rates are low…and it doesn’t pay to fall in love with a house, because who knows if you can actually buy it. And chances are high that it will become bank owned eventually, and then is the best time to try to get a bargain. At least once the bank actually owns the property, you can get a timely response.