Thursday, July 17, 2008

The shortest of sales

It's been a while since I posted on the house-in-Illinois situation. After the short-sale offer was turned down in April, we started to look into doing a deed-in-lieu, which is what we would call in the vernacular "turning the keys back over to the bank." Then in mid-June I got a call from the RE agent telling us we had a better offer, and we were going back to the bank.

Here's the stat sheet: We bought for $309K in 2004. The best offer we've been able to get in the 500+ days that the thing has been on the market is $281. As part of the short sale process, Sovereign Bank had an appraiser come in, and the number he came up with is - get this - $330. In other words, our house apparently has appreciated in value by 10% at the same time that nobody has wanted to buy it and the bottom has dropped out of the housing market nationally. Somebody should tell the buyers how valuable the place is!

So that was the end of that - Sovereign turned down the latest short sale offer based on their fairy tale appraisal. Now we're asking them to go forward with the deed in lieu. I have no idea whether that will happen - no one seems to understand Sovereign's behavior or why they're making the decisions they're making.

I'll be very interested to see what they end up getting for this house after it's all said and done. I'll bet you anything it ain't gonna be no $330K.

3 comments:

Mary said...

I'm so sorry Moti, you know-- we had a couple offers the banks turned down when we went through our troubles, and they would not allow us to refinance either. In the end-- they finally did accept a short sale and lost 60k on it. The market simply does not support the appraisals that are made on houses these days. Had the banks taken the first offers we could have been out of the nightmare sooner and they'd have done better--but I guess the banks are just determined to lose money these days. head shaking... sigh..

SPF said...

I wish I understood the banks' rationales in these kind of situations. I do not see any upside for them. IT's completely incomprehensible to me.

Mary said...

its hard to say what the rationale is--it could just be that they are waiting to get into a different quarter for the purpose of delaying bad stats-- you never know.