On the Hunt for the Next one - Could it be a short sale?

Jan's bored and looking for another project.  No rest for the weary!

 We are looking at two properties this week - the first one's a one bedroom condo a couple of buildings south of our place on Lido Key with marginal beach views.  The other is a three bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage condo near the first one with beach views that we could easily live in.  The one bedroom is a short sale for $90K, the other one is $595K - wow!!

It seems it's hard to find anything less than $100K around here and most one bedrooms sell for ~$150K so we could be on to something...This would be a good winter project and hopefully (god willing) we can clean it up, add some paint, and new furniture and flip it within two months during season.  This means we'd be done before April and just need to sell it.... which always puts us on hold before we buy the next one.

A short sale also takes longer.  Depending on how closely the seller is working with the bank the price may have been pre-negotiated in advance. Essentially the bank has agreed to write down the difference.      However, it's not uncommon that when you make the offer on a short sale property it takes up to 45 to 90 days for the bank to approve the deal.  In the meantime they hold the money and kinda put everything on hold while you are patiently waiting.  I'm not sure what takes so long but in some cases we've seen some amazing deals.. 

The one bedroom deal short sale for $90K has a first mortgage of $222K and a second mortgage of $60K for a total of $282K.  This means the short sale is 32% of the mortgaged amount.  Hard to believe but there are lots of those around here - Welcome to the epicenter of the mortgage crisis.

Wish us luck

If you are interested in educating yourself about Short Sales there's a ton of information on the internet.  A Couple of links that I found useful are listed below.

Short Sales - about.com

Short Sale Process