There are inherent risks in short sales you need to address.

There are two types of risks you face as a real estate agent in working with short sales: business and regulatory.

Business Risk of Short Sales

The biggest risk you have is taking on deals that simply won’t be approved. Frankly, if you are a listing agent you may already have some of those and not be aware of it. We have seen many deals that are short sales and neither the listing agent or the client were aware of it until they went through a preliminary HUD-1. You also need to understand that the banks are going to want to see a legitimate hardship in order to approve a short sale deal. Without that, no deal and a lot of wasted time.

Regulatory Risks

MARS (Mortgage Assistance Relief Services ) Act – The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) under 16 C.F.R. Part 322 - FTC File No. R911003, strictly regulates who may negotiate a short sale deal with the loan servicing companies, their responsibilities and liabilities. As a real estate agent, do you want to be collecting your client's hardship letter, bank statements, tax returns and getting bogged down communicating all of that to the loan servicer? Or, do you want to focus on your business? Nest is fully compliant with the MARS regulation - are you?

Washington DFI/DOL - Our State has recently released guidelines for negotiating short sales. Our founder, Brian Heberling was instrumental in defining those requirements and at Nest Financial, we are compliant with every State and Federal regulation.
 

There are risks – but you don’t have to take them to participate in the short sales market.