Postponing a sale
Why would a lender postpone sale? This is a question that I’ll be answering in detail today. There are several reasons the lender might postpone sale, the obvious one being that they do not want to take the property back. We all know that lenders are in the business of taking payments, not managing properties. If you give the lender a valid reason why they should postpone a sale, many times they will, even if you don’t manage to make initial contact with them until just days before the foreclosure sale. The primary tactic used in getting the lender to postpone sale is submitting a valid purchase and sale agreement. If the foreclosure sale date is very close, you may want to be prepared to send several offers very quickly. What I mean by this, is when you submit a low offer and it’s only days before the foreclosure sale, if they decide that your offer is too low they may reject it. If this happens, and you have a backup offer with a higher price ready to submit, you may still persuade the lender to postpone the sale. Additionally if the foreclosure is imminent you may want to submit an offer that is higher than you would want pay simply to encourage the lender to postpone sale. This is a highly advanced tactic, and should be used sparingly because it may backfire. If this tactic does work for you and you get a sale postponed, you will now need to approach the lender with a lower offer and explanation why your offer changed. What we usually say is that we had time to do a more in-depth inspection and uncovered many more issues with the property. This seems to work quite well.
Remember, the lender will most likely do anything that they can to avoid the foreclosure sale. They want to work something out so they don’t take another REO (Real Estate Owned by the bank) into their inventory, they certainly have enough of them already. Be creative and know that you CAN get a sale postponed, even if it’s only days before the sale. Keep in mind that what I’m talking about here is not meant to be used when negotiating the short sale, only when you first get a deal that’s close to sale. These are tactics used to stop a sale when you first make contact with the lender. I’ll be covering postponing sales while negotiating in a later post.
Cheers,
