Short sale investors see this new trend with concern, especially since some lenders have said that they find deed-in-lieu transactions preferable to short sale transactions since they don’t take as long. Also, homeowners who are going to lose their homes anyway may find this to be a more acceptable alternative since it is being portrayed as a route to 100% resolving the debt rather than worrying about being followed up with later for the remainder just when you have gotten back on your feet.

As a short sale investor, you should not be too worried about this, however. For starters, there are many, many, many homes that will still go through the short sale process, and not all circumstances are going to warrant or qualify for a deed-in-lieu transaction. Additionally, you can point out to homeowners who may be backing out of a short sale that unless the wording in their deed-in-lieu agreement specifies that the debt is considered entirely resolved by the return of the property, this may not be the case.

While deed-in-lieu and a short sale do go on your credit history and impact your credit score, a deed-in-lieu remains on your history for a full 7 years, and you may have to request that it be removed. According to new legislation, short sales may be removed as soon as 3 years.

Certainly, some homeowners may opt for a deed-in-lieu transaction instead of a short sale transaction with you. However, the current deed-in-lieu “push” could actually be a positive, since it may put a dent in homes that lenders were unwilling to short sell anyway. Simply be prepared to answer questions about this style of transaction, then continue doing your short sales and helping people in trouble resolve their personal housing issues.

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One of the biggest concerns for landlord-sellers bargaining short sales is that even in states that do not assess an income tax on conventional short sales in which a homeowner transacts a short sale on the home that he or she lives in, the short sale of a rental property often will result in the issuance of a 10-99 that will be viewed by the state as income. There are ways to deal with this and one is to appeal it, but when dealing with landlords you must remember that these individuals are subject to a different set of tax laws if they are short selling rental properties.

Also, landlords may find themselves in a distressed situation thanks to insurance issues. Particularly if they have made a claim recently, the insurance company may have hiked their rates or even canceled their policies. Due to plummeting equity in many properties and a number of natural disasters in recent months, finding new insurance for rental properties has been for the most part difficult.

While this may not impact your end buyer, it can impact you or another investor who is purchasing the property to hold or season. Make sure that the property is insured and insurable by you even if you do not plan to hold onto it.

As the rules and regulations on short sales change nearly day-to-day, investors much keep abreast of the changes. Only in this manner can you truly help distressed property owners who need a short sale in order to salvage their investments and exit a property.

PS if you haven’t checked out my Free Short Sale Course you are really missing outwww.FreeShortSaleCourse.com

The most straightforward way to handle this disclosure is to include the fact that you are doing a short sale in the contract that deals with the transaction. Do not leave anything to chance. Note that you are doing a short sale, how the lenders are going to be satisfied and make sure that the contract itself allows for the resale of the property. You will be on firmer ground if you decide to “flip” the short sale if both the lender and the seller are aware that you may opt to do this.

Many investors and real estate agents are recommending that you stay in touch with all lenders, even if they are the holders of secondary loans and are less likely to get any direct satisfaction from a short sale. Making sure that the negotiation meets everyone’s needs or at least addresses their stake in the property can help prevent lenders from coming after homeowners later for the payoff of the remainder of the investment.

If you are listing the property in MLS, you may also opt to disclose the fact that the property is a short sale – or that the owner, lender or both or amenable to a short sale – in the listing. Not only will this attract more attention for your listing since short sales are generally perceived – and rightly so – to be a good way to purchase a property at a discount, but it will also further cover your disclosure bases and make sure that there is no question in anyone’s mind that the transaction that you are negotiating is a short sale.

Ultimately, you can create a great deal of wealth, resolve serious financial crises for people in need, and help stem the tide of foreclosures in the country by being an effective short sale negotiator. But you must be very careful to “dot your I’s and cross your T’s” when you are doing a short sale. Make sure that every aspect of your behavior and your negotiations are beyond reproach to establish the best short sale transactions that you possible can and bring satisfaction to every party in the transaction, including yourself.

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From a real estate investing perspective, we’ve learned that there are huge benefits from thinking like a team leader – even if you’re the only one who works in your office. Partnering in this context doesn’t mean you take on an actual business partner. Rather, you’re working to get to know people that may be able to fill in the blanks for you on certain projects, and you’re trying to build a cooperative mentality between the people you already know.

Think of yourself as a football coach, if you like. Obviously, you have to bring the players together as a team, but you’re also coordinating the efforts of the rest of the coaching staff to bring those plays together. You’re working with your team owner and their staff on the administrative stuff, you’re teaming up with the media to manage the publicity – you’re building a network of relationships with one common goal: encouraging the players to win games.

And so it goes with closing real estate deals. Sometimes you’ll need the help of an attorney, sometimes you’ll need your accountant’s advice, and sometimes you’ll need to talk to that private lender who always seems to come through for you. When you’re a real estate investor, what other people do you need on your team?

Your first step is to find a go-to person who has been around in the real estate game for a while. This is your partner for those trouble spots you’re going to find in almost every deal. Even better, find someone with experience in coaching new real estate investors. Now, that may sound like an opinion rather than fact – especially since I’m a real estate coach – but I promised to tell you what I know about making more money than you ever dreamed, and this is the way to go. Think of it as an extremely cost-effective continuing education program.

Your in-house team is your next big partnership. Get advice from your guru on what skill sets to look for and how to structure the office duties. Then train your new people extremely well. The more they know about what you’re doing and why, the better partners they can become – just in case you need a pinch-hitter someday.

Include a title expert on your real estate team. You might think that everyone is meticulous about keeping a clear chain of title on each property in the area, but people make mistakes. Develop a partnership with someone who knows how to solve title problems – maybe someone who works for a title company, or someone who used to. It may come in handy later.

Your network of referral sources may take the most time to cultivate, but partnering with these people will also generate the biggest profits. You can’t make the money if you don’t have the deals, and the right partners can fill your pipeline to the brim. Take the time to get to know the people who know the rest of the people in your area!

We’ve learned that the best referral source of them all is the real estate agent. According to the statistics, they’re involved in at least 75 percent of all real estate transactions. They have to complete hours and hours of training before they can obtain and keep a license, so you know they’re committed to the business. And, if you think about it, they know just about everyone in town!

As you approach your new team members, remember that you have something to offer them as well (besides referral fees and paychecks). When you specialize in short sales, you have knowledge and skills that not many others in real estate have. You are the expert on problem properties in your area – and if there’s an area in this country without real estate problems, I’d love to hear about it.

When you partner with other people in your community, you’re doing more than just furthering your own business interests. You are becoming a part of that community. You become someone that other people want to partner with. You are perpetuating the idea that it really does take a group effort to accomplish something important – in this case, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure.

If you need to know more about building partnerships in your real estate business, check our our blog post about building your real estate business on our Strategic Real Estate Coach website!

Real estate investors have to be extra careful when structuring back-to-back transactions. The way some people have gone about it in the past, those closings got a reputation for being scams. Prosecutors can make a lot of legal trouble for a title company and an investor for allowing the true intent of those transactions to be unclear.

Avoid accusations of fraud by simply setting some ground rules. Transparency is the key here. When you take the time to go over everything with the title company ahead of time, you can meet their objections with sensible procedures to make your back-to-back closings work for everyone.

1. Make it clear that the homeowner has no equity or negative equity in the property. Be ready with documentation like written gross payoff letters, which prove how much is owed on the property, and net payoff letters, which show the payoff after discounting the mortgage. The sales price minus the amount owed needs to be zero or less.

2. No cash back is allowed for the seller on the first (A-B) transaction. The purchase price, to be paid in full by the investor, is simply the total amount of all lien payoffs plus the cost of the conveyance fee for transferring the deed from the seller to the investor.

3. The second sale, or the B to C transaction, must be a completely separate transaction in that the C buyer must be an independent third party who is unrelated to the prior property owner.

4. The vested property owner in the first (A-B) transaction must be at the closing to sign the HUD-1 in person to show that they have received full disclosure of the terms of the sale, including the sales price. Also, the property owner and the investor/buyer must both agree to release the HUD-1 to the end buyer’s lender if that lender needs evidence of the amount of each lien’s payoff.

5. There must be written evidence that the investor/buyer’s funding lender on the purchase has full notice of the “double transfer” (property owner to investor, then investor to purchaser) involved in the overall sales transaction(s). This isn’t necessarily true of the foreclosing lender on the property. To the best of my knowledge, that lender has no right to obtain information on what happens to the property or the parties to the first transaction after the short sale of that property is closed.

If you have those five points covered, that juggling act can turn into a perfectly-timed relay race. This is one reason why I love being a real estate coach. I can talk about what I have learned over the years so you can know what you’re doing before you get into this stuff. If you’d like to avoid fraud in your investing business, take the time to learn from someone who has been there and lived to tell about it.

Help yourself avoid legal problems as a short sale investor. Keep reading attorney Jeff Watson’s latest words of wisdom about real estate law on the Strategic Real Estate Coach website!

Camtasia is highly appreciated as a video editing resource. Camtasia produces HD-quality video content for the internet and for devices that are mobile. Tweaks or interruptions are prevented on using Camtasia. It makes very good videos with file sizes that are compact in nature. With a single click, Camtasia has the potential to document all the activities on your desktop. This makes the compilation and saving of all your files very efficient.

As a video editing tool, Camtasia will enable you to convert your real estate videos onto pages on the web. This will let you direct all your targeted traffic there. Since web surfers usually respond better to videos, the rates of conversion become substantially high. Users feel a strong connection and relation since they can both watch and hear all that you are saying and showing.

You can also produce multi-media presentations that incorporate all that you want to cover to make a sale using Camtasia for video editing. Usually even the most skeptical customers are also easily impressed with this method. Your main mission should be to create a video that clearly demonstrates the utility of your product.

Sony Vegas is another common and reputed name for a video editing tool. It is well known for being a good program and is said to have more capability and usefulness than other freebies. Since it has updated features and numerous benefits, many real estate agents have been using this software to generate the best of their videos.

The collection of Vegas Pro 9, the latest offer of Sony Vegas incorporates two potential applications that function effortlessly together for providing an intuitive and efficient environment for broadcast and video professionals of various streams and fields. This method of video editing is speedily gaining priority over many others available in the market.

Sony Vegas as a comprehensive suite provides the most progressive and robust platform that is available for content formation and production. With superior effects processing, complementary editorial tools, wide format support, incomparable audio support, the Pro collection of Vegas improves and augments your work flow. From acquisition to the delivery, from the basic camera to the Blu-ray Disc?, this collection provides all that you require from a good video editing software.

With Camtasia and Sony Vegas video editing software, you can achieve incredible results for your online real estate social marketing. You can take video marketing to greater heights in terms of success using Camtasia and Sony Vegas which are best suited for video editing. Video editing is vital for superior promotion of real estate listings. You can think about some other software as well if they go with your necessities and budget.

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