In May 2012, Dear Hubby and I found the perfect house.
This house checked off almost every box on our wish list. It was spacious, had curb appeal, had a fenced in yard, fell within a realistic budget, seemed well maintained, and wasn’t hideously ugly.
The house had sat on the market for roughly five months because it was slightly over-priced. After two months of fruitless searching, we felt that this house was destined for us – why else would it just be sitting there, waiting for us to come along and snatch it up?
We put in an offer and the homeowners leaped to accept it.
YAY!
Not so fast.
The house was a short sale. For any real estate novices who may not know the term, allow me to enlighten you: “short sale” is the cruelest term in real estate. Short sales are not short. They are long. Very, very long.
A short sale is when the homeowner owes more than the house is worth, can’t afford to keep the house, but wants to avoid a foreclosure. After completing a mountain of paperwork and proving that they are broke, the homeowner gets permission from the bank to sell the house at a loss. The homeowner gets no money – they just get rid of an unwanted house. The money from the sale goes to the bank to satisfy the homeowner’s debt.
As a result, an offer on a short sale must not only be accepted by the homeowner, but also by the bank that will be getting the money from the sale. And because banks are apparently ridiculously stupid, slow, incompetent, and run by a bunch of retarded, feces-throwing monkeys, the process takes absolutely forever. (I apologize to any readers who may work in this industry; my comments are not directed at you personally – or at least, they probably aren’t directed at you personally – but are merely a means of venting an enormous amount of frustration which will be explained in a later post.)
A typical short sale apparently takes 3-6 months to close. We’ve been waiting for almost 7 months and haven’t even gotten the bank to agree to the sale price yet.
SHORT sale. Ha.
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