It's frustrating to wait for a bank response on a distressed home you want to buy or sell!

A challenge we’re running into with the market weirdness is the deceptive status of listings in and around San Jose and Silicon Valley.  Sometimes a house or condo appears on the web to be a listing that’s available and ready for your offer, but in fact the agents are no longer accepting offers on the seller’s behalf.

Since a large percentage of our San Jose real estate sales consists of distressed properties (short sales or bank owned properties), the situation is more complicated than with a “normal sale” for many homes.  (Non-distressed listings gleefully proclaim, “this is a NORMAL sale! no bank approval needed!” because they know that serious buyers, particularly highly motivated ones, just want to buy a home without delays and games.) 

With distressed sales, the complications usually come in the way of bank involvement on the seller’s side (beyond just funding the buyer’s loan).
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Be careful what you wish for. The news stories make it sound so attractive – get a home for 10% less than market value. That may happen. Sometimes. The national average for short sales actually closing is extremely low, by some counts as low as 10 or 11 percent.

What about San Jose area short sales? Lets start with the lay of the land in Santa Clara County specifically (Silicon Valley includes Santa Clara County and a bit of Alameda, Santa Cruz, and San Mateo Counties). Some areas are loaded with short sale listings, others have few, if any. The ˜best deals, in terms of low pricing, are going to be in areas with a lot of the short sales because they sell for less and pull property values down, making them more and more affordable. Those are the areas with lower priced homes, generally, the entry level areas.

In places like South San Jose, the south county areas, and Blossom Valley, for instance, most of the entry level homes are short sales. Values are plummeting there.

In places like Cupertino, Saratoga, and Los Gatos, there are hardly any short sales. Virtually none. And home values are rising.

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