Kelly was an upperclassman at George Mason University in Fairfax VA. She was tired of dorm life and wanted to live off campus. Her parents suggested to her that she buy a home near campus and rent a few rooms to other students to help cover her mortgage. Under that plan, her housing costs would […]
On this bright Saturday morning, hundreds of young kids will be gathering at Yeonas Field in Vienna to kick off the start of another Little League season. Some are being introduced to the national pasttime for the first time and others are 12 year old “veterans” playing their last year and hoping to represent Vienna […]
Technology is great. When I started in the business in the late 80s I would have never thought I would be writing a blog (and would not even have known what the word meant). I would have never thought my clients would be using a computer to find homes. And that they would be able to pull up pictures, get aerial views, estimated values and more – unfathomable.
This is all wonderful but despite all of our advances, nothing beats old fashioned “boots on the ground” (just saw Acts of Valor with my son). Let me explain what I mean
I read with great amusement Gene Weingarten’s column in this Sundays Washington Post magazine titled, “Soft Boiled Detectives, A suburban police blotter” which featured excerpts from the weekly Vienna VA police reports. Ripped from the headlines were stories about a dispute between a landlord and his tenant over which toilet each should use (they shared the house) and another about an intoxicated individual with sushi in his pants.
Recently I wrote a blog outlining the basics of buying foreclosures, short sales and other distress property. I mentioned in that post that short sales are a vast wilderness with many pits, traps and paths leading nowhere. The stories below reinforce that statement. These are real cases I have worked over the last few years. The names and some other data have been modified to protect privacy but the key points are accurate and, most importantly, the timelines are real. The moral of all of these stories is that before deciding to pursue a short sale, make sure you have enough time and resources to wait for the bank to make a decision. If you are one who likes certainty and control, the short sale world is not for you. There is very little the buyer or buyer agent can do to shorten the time between contract and settlement. The pace of the transaction depends on the bank negotiator, the seller and the listing agent. On to the stories….
