Short Sale, Part 1: Present Laughter
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Sandra Tsing Loh goes through a short sale.
Recently, a friend asked me why my hair had turned white and why my eyebrows had fallen out. "Well," I replied brightly, "it’s because I’ve just been through a short sale!"
For those of you who don’t know, "short sale" is the real estate term for a house that...? Okay, it’s like the owners bought a house whose price has dropped so much they can’t make the payments. Because maybe they planned to refi? So now the bank owns it. But no, that would be foreclosure. It’s like the owners...? The bank...?
All right, I admit even to this day I don’t know what a short sale is, exactly, which may have been part of the original problem. Yes, gentle listeners, I began this experience just like you. It was all a fog.
All one ever hears about short sales comes via manic rants told by a nice Silverlake couple bouncing a Baby Björn and crying in a bar. "And then the appraisal!" "And then the inspection." "And then we learn there was a second mortgage!"
I met a professional violinist recently who put in nine offers this past year. The first eight were short sales. The ninth was the one that stuck. While he did still have hair, his violin had become... very very tiny.
All I knew was that I was divorcing, I needed a place to live, and my dream cottage in Bungalow Heaven had just fallen through. Of the many sorrows and problems of midlife? Well, I had this profound feeling that if I could have just gotten that comforting bungalow...
This was such a comforting bungalow that when I brought my other fortysomething women friends to see it – well, while happily married themselves, some for as long as 20 years, each expressed a sudden mysterious urge to move out of her home so she too could have a bungalow.
Anyway, it was in this glaze of yet another loss, yet another attempt at emotional closure gone wrong, that my realtor Millie – actually her assistant – suggested I put an offer in.
And this is how all these stories start.
It starts on a lark – this one akin to trying to fly a paper plane across the grand canyon.
So I made an offer – a ridiculously low-ball offer, on a giant turn-of-the-century Victorian, in Pasadena. How low ball? We are talking $150,000, below the already reduced price. If you saw even my filthy car, you would know how wrong for me was this giant home. I signed the offer and braced myself for the Laughtergram.
Because what was there to lose? Everything, it turns out. More next week.
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