Melbourne Florida Short Sale Attorney
Negotiating Short-Sales for Homeowners in Melbourne - Palm Bay and all of Brevard County
If you have decided you no longer wish to keep your home, and would rather leave the property and eliminate your liability to your mortagge company, you should speak with a Melbourne Florida foreclosure attorney and short-sale attorney at the Bowin Law Group. We've helped hundreds of Brevard homeowners move from their homes, sell their property and walk away from their debt with the bank. For the cost of about 1 mortgage payment, we may be able to do the same for you. Please read about the short-sale process and our short-sale strategy below, then contact us to schedule a free consultation to see how we may be able to help you with your short-sale. Or, fill out our Free Case Evaluation and someone from our office will contact you shortly.
Why do I need an attorney to help me sell my home? Why can't I just walk away from the home and mail the keys to the lender?
If you simply stop paying your mortgage and walk away from your home, not only will the bank foreclose on your home, but it can still sue you for the remaining balance on your loan. For example, if you owe $200k on your home, and the Bank sells the home for $100k in a foreclosure sale, the bank can still sue you for the additional $100k still left on the loan. After selling the home, the Bank can garnish your wages and your bank accounts as well as seize most any property that you own. The Bank can continue their collection efforts for the next 20 years. In other words, walking away can cost your big time for a long time. The Bowin Law Group can help prevent that.
The attorneys at the Bowin Law Group will negotiate with your lender to eliminate your debt to the Bank. This is most often accomplished though a short-sale, where the homeowner sells the home to a third party for less than the balance of the homeowner's mortgage. Our attorneys then negotiate with the Bank to not only accept the sale, but to waive the remaining balance on the homeowner's loan. Consider the example given above. However, instead of letting the Bank sell the home in a foreclosure and allowing the Bank to sue the homeowner for the next 20 years, we negotiate with the Bank to allow a sale to a third party and to waive the remaining $100k debt. If this sounds too good to be true, don't worry, it's not.
Why would the bank agree to waive my debt?
The last thing the bank wants is to spend tens of thousands of dollars in a lengthy foreclosure action to repossess a home that isn't worth the amount of your mortgage. If the bank knows you will defend their foreclosure action, they are likely to allow you time to complete a short-sale rather than spend their money foreclosing on the home.
Just consider this statistic - Approximately 92-95% of Brevard homeowner's do not defend their foreclosure actions. They simply give up and walk away. The banks are very aware of this statistic. The banks know with a 95% certainty that they can just foreclose on the home, pay about $3k in foreclosure expenses, and take the home whenever they want. This means that in 95% of the cases, the bank has no incentive to negotiate anything with the homeowner, because they know the homeowner isn't going to put up a fight. Sadly, most of these homeowners will be left with a sizeable debt that the banks can pursue them for over the next 20 years.
Now consider a case where the homeowner decides to conduct a short-sale of the home and engages a short-sale attorney to represent them. In this case, instead of a quick foreclosure that will cost the Bank a few thousand dollars to complete, the Bank now faces a very lengthy foreclosure case (often 2 years or longer) which may cost the Bank $50k or more to complete. Plus, there is absolutely no guarantee that the Bank will actually win the foreclosure. In fact, the Bowin Law Group has had tremendous success preventing the Banks from obtaining foreclosure judgments. So the Bank runs a huge risk if it pursues a foreclosure where it knows the homeowners has retained a short-sale attorney.
Because a short-sale indicates to the bank that the homeowner is attempting to sell the home for the best possible price, the Bank is reassured that its collateral (the home) is being protected. The utilities are still turned on so there is no mold build-up. The homeowner is not stripping the fixtures out of the home and the home is not being vandalized. Instead, the home will be maintained in good condition, allowing the homeowner to sell the home for more than the Bank would otherwise receive in a forecosure sale 2 years down the road. All the Bank has to do to get the best price for the home today, and to avoid all the costs and uncertainty of a 2 year foreclosure battle, is to waive the homeowner's debt. Financially, it's a no-brainer for the bank.
When should I hire a short-sale attorney?
Most foreclosure defense firms will not represent you until a foreclosure action has been filed. This is not the case at the Bowin Law Group. Although the Bowin Law Group is a premiere foreclosure defense firm, and probably the largest foreclosure law firm in Brevard County, we pride ourselves on the ability to help homeowners avoid foreclosure altogether. We are able to to do this because we have developed a unique legal strategy for preventing foreclosures that, to our knowledge, no other law firm in Florida has developed. In this regard, an ounce of prevention is worth well more than a pound of cure.
However, in the event your Bank does file a foreclosure action while we are attempting to short-sell your home, our foreclosure defense attorneys will answer your foreclosure case at no additional charge to you. Our entire short-sale and foreclosure defense fee rarely exceeds the cost of approximately 1 mortgage payment.
You should consult with a short-sale attorney at the Bowin Law Group as soon as you determine that you no longer wish to keep your home, or when you determine that you can no longer afford your mortgage payments. By getting the Bowin Law Group involved early, we can inform the bank immediately that you have retained our firm to help sell the home and, most importantly, to defend any future foreclosure action the bank would otherwise file. This notice should send up a red flag at the Bank, notifying them that you are one of the 5% that will actually defend a foreclosure case. Because they already know the costs associated with a contested foreclosure action, they are more likely to pull your case out of the foreclsoure pile to allow you time to complete the short-sale. It's a win-win situation for you and the bank.
Schedule a Free Consultation
Because the full details of our short-sale and foreclosure prevention process is too detailed and complex to adeqauately describe on this page, we offer a Free Consultation to all Brevard homeowners wishing to learn more about how we can help you avoid foreclosure and eliminate your debt with your Bank.
To schedule an appointment in one of our Brevard County office, call us at the number above or complete our online Free Case Evaluation and someone from our office will contact you.
Contact a Melbourne foreclosure attorney at our firm today!
