Patience and Buying A Lender Owned Home

Today, there are 67 listings marked as “bank owned,” 110 marked as “lender-owned,” and an additional 63 listings marked as “REO” in the Tucson MLS.

The name of the game with lender owned homes: patience. Banks, in general, don’t care about your timelines.

As long as there’s no bidding war for the home - as can happen when the lenders price the home to sell and FAST - then here’s how this usually plays out:

1. Submit an offer to the listing agent, who then submits it to the bank.

2. Wait. Sometimes wait much longer than the expiration date on your offer.

3. The bank sends back some addendums for you to sign, and may counter offer some of the terms of your offer. There are many, many pages of addendums, in which you give up a plethora of rights, agree to numerous bank-specified terms, and generally agree to abide by their rules, where they have lots of rights and abilities and you have none.

4. You deliberate. You consider. You sign the addendums and send ‘em back.

5. You wait. Again. Deal’s not a deal yet until the bank signs it.

6. The bank signs the addendum and sends it back via the listing agent. Sometimes, the bank even deigns to send it back within a day or two of them executing that addendum. So that they only eat a few days of your limited inspection period.

You want to buy a lender owned property? No problem. But be prepared to be patient. Some banks respond in a day or two, some respond in a week or two.

Actually, that’s nothing compared to the wait times for Bank responses on short sales. But that’s a story for another day.

Photo via Flickr, courtesy of zoomcityzoom