Selling Your Home Fast for Top Dollar Imperiled by New Federal Law
Dunedin, FL (PRWEB) December 21, 2013 -- Selling your home the fastest way possible and for the highest price is becoming more risky as a result of new federal legislation which becomes effective in January, 2014, according to a new article on the Advanced Realty Team website posted yesterday.
The new legislation is the seller finance provision of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which will become effective Jan. 10, 2014. And the fastest way to sell a house has always been seller finance, which has always carried the risk of default.
Seller financing is a method of selling a home in which the seller assumes the role of the bank and holds a note or a mortgage and a note. The buyer may make a down payment and then monthly payments to the seller. Since there is no bank there is no need for an appraisal or lengthy loan approval and buyer and seller can close the transaction with the assistance of a title company or attorney.
Offers Streamlined Method
Seller finance is faster because there is no appraisal, the price is whatever the two parties agree on and a sale can take place as soon as the title agent can determine the seller has a good title to the home.
“Actually seller finance is what attracted us to real estate in the first place,” said George Beardsley, Broker-President of Advanced, a small Dunedin, Fl-based real estate boutique that has been buying houses fast, and often with owner finance, for two decades in the Tampa Bay area.
Advanced has already announced it will continue to offer its service to people who want to sell a house fast by buying the house from them fast.
Faster, but with More Risk
And while faster and cheaper than selling with bank financing, seller financing holds the risk the buyer will not pay, requiring the seller to seek legal assistance and foreclose on the mortgage, which is costly and with uncertain—many times seriously bad—consequences.
“While we certainly have held mortgages on house we sold where we have had to foreclose, seller financing has been good to us and put a lot of good people in houses when the bank had said no,” he said.
While Dodd-Frank is not as strict on people selling one house a year as it is “professionals,” the new law requires individual home owners to meet certain requirements of the law and provides extremely heavy financial penalties for failure to take the required actions.
Details Available for Sellers
Details of the new law can be found at the http://www.AdvancedRealtyTeam.com website and all homeowners considering seller financing under the new law should seek the assistance of a board certified real estate attorney, especially since penalties even without legal fees can range easily into the thousands of dollars, he said.
Dodd-Frank, which supposedly is designed to protect the very people who are now at increased risk, comes at a time when less than 20 per cent of the United States population is able to get a bank loan. Owner financing with seller carry back mortgages should be available to make up for the lack of bank financing, however at a much greater risk than it would normally carry, Beardsley said.
Even with the greater risk, seller financing may still be used by homeowners who are aware of the new law and know how to mitigate the risk.
Advanced Realty Team, Inc., a Dunedin, FL-based real estate boutique that has specialized in buying homes for the last two decades has announced that it will continue to buy houses from home owners who want to sell fast and at top dollar and offer certain safeguards to the seller to avoid violation of the law and its penalties.
A summary of the way the new law affects seller financing can be found at http://www.AdvancedRealtyTeam.com. Advanced Realty, a Dunedin, FL real estate boutique, when buying with seller financing will use the services of a board certified real estate attorney and provide certain additional safeguards for the seller to mitigate the risk of the new law.
http://www.advancedrealtyteam.com
George Beardsley, Advanced Realty Team, Inc., http://www.advancedrealtyteam.com, +1 (727) 644-4661, [email protected]
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