A short and sweet guide to short sales

Image courtesy McGraw-Hill.

Book Review
Title: "How to Use a Short Sale to Stop Home Foreclosure and Protect Your Finances"
Author: Robert Irwin
Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2009; 208 pages; $18.95

With all the fancified, high-tech "gadgetological" stuff occupying our mental radar screens, sometimes the value of simplicity gets forgotten. In "How to Use a Short Sale to Stop Home Foreclosure and Protect Your Finances," prolific author Robert Irwin takes a back-to-basics approach to cut through the muddled media messaging, rumors and well-meaning (but often confusing or inaccurate) advice from all comers about short sales: "Do it!" "Don't do it!"

In this short and sweet short-sale primer, Irwin reduces a short sale to the motivations underlying whether the bank will green light your deal, and offers a basic guide to the logistics of getting it closed.

Irwin opens "How to Use a Short Sale to Stop Home Foreclosure and Protect Your Finances" by sketching out How a Short Sale Works: "when you sell your home ... for less than the balance you owe on your mortgages, it is called a short sale."

He goes on to set the stage for a book full of sound short-sale strategies tailored to create transactions that make business sense to the lender:

"(M)any lenders are willing to accept a short payoff (less than they are owed) when the owner cannot make the mortgage payments. The reason a lender will forgive all or a large portion of the unpaid amount of the loan is that a short sale saves it time and money by avoiding a more costly foreclosure procedure."

Basic, yes. But informative to would-be short sellers seeking a basic understanding of the procedure.

Irwin goes on to explain the mortgage dilemmas to which a short sale is a feasible solution, spells out the advantages of a short sale over a foreclosure, and provides some examples of homeowners who have successfully resolved their mortgage crises by divesting their upside-down homes and unsustainable mortgage payments via short sales.

In the next chapter, "How a Short Sale Can Help You," Irwin offers more examples of the upsides of short sales, but also injects some reality into the equation, with a briefing on the potential complications and ramifications of a short sale gone wrong, including glitches with junior mortgages and deficiency judgments. ...CONTINUED

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