The Short Sale Shimmy (Part 1)

Ladies and gentlemen, we have an accord. Actually we have two. Tracy told you about one of them, in which we sell and move out of our 3-bedroom condo in late September. That contract appears to be rock solid, except that we goofed the closing date and need to do an addendum (note to self).

The new contract is to buy our next home, a 4-bedroom house a few miles northwest of our current home in a town where we used to live. It will be our first single-family detached home, garage, and private yard since we were kids. The house is fairly spacious, and the yard features some nice trees, a jacuzzi, a gazebo, and a hammock stand, but no hammock. The seller can use the hammock but wanted to leave the large lawn stuff behind. The neighborhood has little crime and good schools. The kids will still ride the bus to school for now.

Now the fun and adventurous part is that the house we're buying is a short sale, meaning the seller is asking the banks to accept less money than is actually owed, in order to avoid foreclosure. Therefore, even though we and the seller have signed a contract, it's really no good until the banks approve. That will probably take about a month, according to our agent. But our agent and the seller's agent think the offer is good and the banks will probably accept it. Plus, our agent says that the other agent is really good at pushing short sales through. We'll see. The real adventure will begin if one of the banks is not happy with the offer. We have options, none of which are good if the banks don't accept our offer. So it will take nerves of steel, as well as lots of Tums in my case.