In case you missed the Emergency Short Sale teleconference today…..

Here is the replay.

Listen NOW to FREE Agent Short Sale Secrets Replay.

Why do you need to listen to this Short Sale Secrets replay?

Simple…..there are massive…evolutionary…rule changing new laws and regulations happening now with Short Sales.

As we discussed in a previous blog post the entire Short Sale process is about to change…

For example:

1) Treasury (as in the US Government) will release a new Short Sale (and deed in lieu) program…this month. Literally, days away.

2) The new program will simplify and speed-up the Short Sale process. Yes, the streamlined Short Sale is finally here!

3) This new program will ‘encourage’ more servicers and borrowers to participate…in other words, expect the Fed to put pressure on lenders/ servicers to push their borrowers to do Short Sales vs Foreclosures.

4) The entire Short Sale process is going to be standardized. You read that correctly, a new national standard for the entire Short Sale process!

5) The new program will force banks to reduce the time to close Short Sales.

Listen NOW to FREE Agent Short Sale Secrets Replay.

Now, for California agents….

When you listen to this FREE replay you will hear directly from one of our  guest speakers….. as he shares with you all the details on the NEW LAW that forces lenders to respond the all Short Sale offers within 21 days. AND if they offer includes a HUD…the new law requires lenders to respond within….4 days.

All of this information is subject to changes but, you get the idea.

Short Sales must be a focus of every Realtor.

If the co-CEO of RE/MAX and the Founder of Keller/ Williams didn’t convince you that Short Sales are the make money now opportunity for every agent…then the info you are about to learn from this Emergency Short Sale Teleconference will…

Listen NOW to FREE Agent Short Sale Secrets Replay.

Everytime we post about this subject we always get emails from agents who think that we are advocating their sellers to do ‘Buy and Bails’

We are not…never have and never will.

However, the home owners are figuring it out on their own….and you..as a real estate professional need to be aware. The simple fact is that in the current political and economic climate the stigma of ‘walking away’ from your home is nothing like it was just 3 years ago. I clearly remember when being in foreclosure made you a social outcast.

No more.

This is an excellent article from the LATimes.com.

Do you have real estate clients who are doing ’strategic foreclosures’….what do you do when a client calls you wanting to do a ‘buy and bail’….let us know in the comments….

Who is more likely to walk away from a house and a mortgage — a person with super-prime credit scores or someone with lower scores?

Research using a massive sample of 24 million individual credit files has found that homeowners with high scores when they apply for a loan are 50% more likely to “strategically default” — abruptly and intentionally pull the plug and abandon the mortgage — compared with lower-scoring borrowers.

National credit bureau Experian teamed with consulting company Oliver Wyman to identify the characteristics and debt management behavior of the growing numbers of homeowners who bail out of their mortgages with none of the expected warning signs, such as nonpayments on other debts.

With foreclosures, delinquencies and loan losses at record levels, strategic defaults and walkaways are among the hottest subjects in residential real estate finance. Unlike in earlier academic studies, Experian and Wyman could tap into credit files over extended periods to identify patterns associated with strategic defaults.

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Among researchers’ findings are these eye-openers:

* The number of strategic defaults is far beyond most industry estimates — 588,000 nationwide during 2008, more than double the total in 2007. They represented 18% of all serious delinquencies that extended for more than 60 days in last year’s fourth quarter.

* Strategic defaulters often go straight from perfect payment histories to no mortgage payments at all. This is in stark contrast with most financially distressed borrowers, who try to keep paying on their mortgage even after they’ve fallen behind on other accounts.

* Strategic defaults are heavily concentrated in negative-equity markets where home values zoomed during the boom and have cratered since 2006. In California last year, the number of strategic defaults was 68 times higher than it was in 2005. In Florida it was 46 times higher. In most other parts of the country, defaults were about nine times higher in 2008 than in 2005.

* Two-thirds of strategic defaulters have only one mortgage — the one they’re walking away from on their primary homes. Individuals who have mortgages on multiple houses also have a higher likelihood of strategic default, but researchers believe that many of these walkaways are from investment properties or second homes.

* Homeowners with large mortgage balances generally are more likely to pull the plug than those with lower balances. Similarly, people with credit ratings in the two highest categories measured by VantageScore — a joint scoring venture created by Experian and the two other national credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion — are far more likely to default strategically than people in lower score categories.

* People who default strategically and lose their houses appear to understand the consequences of what they’re doing. Piyush Tantia, an Oliver Wyman partner and a principal researcher on the study, said strategic defaulters “are clearly sophisticated,” based on the patterns of selective payments observable in their credit files. For example, they tend not to default on home equity lines of credit until after they bail out on their main mortgages, sometimes to draw down more cash on the equity line.

Strategic defaulters may know that their credit scores will be severely depressed by their mortgage abandonment, Tantia said, but they appear to look at it as a business decision: “Well, I’m $200,000 in the hole on my house, and yes, I’ll damage my credit,” he said of defaulters. But they see it as the most practical solution under the circumstances.

Do you know about the NEW systems and techniques to close Short Sales in less than 30 days? Watch the FREE Agent Short Sale Secrets video now….next, grab your FREE Agent Short Sale Secrets book.

The Experian-Wyman study does not try to explore the ethical or legal aspects of mortgage walkaways. But it does suggest that lenders and loan servicers take steps to screen and identify strategic defaulters in advance and possibly avoid offering them loan modifications, since they’ll probably just re-default on them anyway.

What happens next in your real estate market….what to expect in 2010?

….lets start with the most important question…how long will it take for homes to be worth what they were at the peak of the housing bubble?

Fellow real estate professionals, please don’t be angered by what you are about to read. Be prepared.

Stop waiting for the market to ‘return to normal’.

At this point you simply must accept that this market….with little to no home value appreciation, with Short Sales and Foreclosures in abundance…IS the new normal.

There are agents in THIS market who are making a fortune because they have accepted that this is their market. In other words, they have learned the skills that this market demands.

Folks like Kris and Kim Darney……Kevin Hall. Listen to this 90 minute Short Sale teleconference where these agents shared with you how they have gone from 0 to selling literally hundereds of homes. The Darneys…this year alone…will earn $1,000,000. (95% from short sales.). Listen to the interview now.

Moody’s Investors Service threw cold water on optimistic projections of a V-shaped recovery in the battered U.S. housing market, predicting it could take more than 10 years to get back to boom-level prices.

“For many reasons, the rebound will be disproportionately small compared to the decline,” Moody’s said this week in its latest outlook on the residential market. “It will take more than a decade to completely recover from the 40% peak-to-trough decline in national home prices.”

The housing market is in the third year of the current downturn, one of the worst corrections in U.S. history as a result of the economic recession and the mortgage industry nearly grinding to a halt during the credit crunch.

“The bursting of the housing bubble precipitated a crisis in financial markets the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression and plummeted the nation into recession,” Moody’s said.

“The scars that this downturn will leave on the economy and the housing market will be long lasting and persist in nearly all facets of the housing industry, including the demand for homes, ownership patterns, homebuilding, and house price appreciation,” the analysts forecast.

“It will take more than a decade for many measures of housing activity to regain ground that has been lost as a result of the correction: The intense downturn will overcorrect for the excesses in the housing market generated by the boom years,” they added.

Despite the ongoing challenges facing the U.S. housing market such as rising foreclosures and a supply glut, the rally in home-builder stocks shows investors are hopeful the worst is over. The sector has doubled from the March lows.

Moody’s said the home-building industry will rebound, “but a lingering overhang of inventories, combined with consolidation in the industry and caution on the part of both home builders and lenders to builders, will keep the pace of construction from reaching the peak it achieved at the end of 2006.”

On home values, the analysts said price volatility has been “particularly wild” during this housing cycle, with a giddy run-up followed by the dramatic crash. However, prices “will behave in a much more moderate manner during the recovery.”

Agents, in this market…Short Sales = Money. Learn the NEW systems and techniques to close Short Sales in less than 30 days. (you read that right….30 days.). Watch the FREE Short Sale Secrets video then download your FREE Short Sale book.

According to the latest data available from the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes, the prices of single-family homes in 20 major cities rose in June for the second month in a row. The national index rose in the second quarter, the first quarterly gain in three years.

Yet Moody’s predicted home prices “will remain at a persistently lower level than we anticipated prior to the crisis, and it will take a full decade from the 2010 bottom just for the [Case-Shiller] national index to climb back to its 2006 peak.”

On a regional basis, Moody’s said hard-hit states such as Florida and California will be among the last to recover and “will only regain their pre-bust peak in the early 2030s, well after the nation does.” Meanwhile, a decimated Wall Street will weigh on New York’s recovery, although the state’s overall price decline will be less severe.

Realtors, is it too late for you to become a REO Listing Agent? NO WAY! The greatest waves of foreclosures are still coming. How many REOs could be hitting the market soon? Some estimates call for as many as 5,000,000 NEW REOs coming for sale soon. Watch the FREE Agent REO Secrets video and grab your FREE REO Secrets book!

“In general, the length of the downturn and the length of recovery in a region will depend on the degree of aggressive lending or overinvestment in housing that occurred during the boom,” said Celia Chen, senior director of housing economics at Moody’s Economy.com. “On the recovery side, states with weaker job growth will also take longer to return to peak.”