Short sale acceptance

[Anonymous]

I am placing an offer on a property owned by bank of america thats on a short sale and i know it takes a while. Meanwhile, I also plan to continue my house hunting and place other offers as i find my dream home.

I am confused here if i can do this? what if i have 2 accepted offers/contracts. In what way can i get rid out of one of the contract. What is that secret Clause that i need to put in with my offer .......expiration date ? or any other...

please help

[Anonymous]

Theoretically, you can only have one offer in the works at a time.

Let's say you CAN put more than one offer down ~ if any (or all) of them are accepted, you've just entered into a contract. At the very least, you run the risk of losing your Earnest Money Deposit (standard with an offer being accepted) ~ at risk, you can be sued by the seller for breach of contract.

I really don't know of any realtor who'll help you plunk offers on more than house.

[Anonymous]

You can put a response time into your offer but be aware that if it's not a reasonable amount of time for a short sale, you won't likely get a response at all.

We wanted quick responses so we avoided short sales and looked for motivated sellers. In our offers we put 48 hours for the response time. If that time elapsed without a response we were free to continue house hunting. It happened with the first home we put an offer on and i'm glad we put that time limit in there so we wouldn't be stuck.

[RachelRachel]

Our realtor mentioned he had no problem submitting multiple offers.  I didn't think this was right so I told DH we are only going to do one at a time.  He argued saying realtor wouldn't say it if it wasn't legal, but I told him I don't care it's not his money at risk.  I didn't think that maybe there was a time limit clause to save us in case seller is taking forever to get back to us.  Is 48 hours sufficient or would 1 week be good?   And, will that really protect your earnest money deposit.  We are putting up $2,500 and I would be sick if we lost that.

[Anonymous]

OK, you guys are starting to get me nervous.  I'm no where near the purchasing phase since I'm going with NACA however if I went FHA I could buy now and listening to everything I may be back to my original decision of purchasing a new construction home.  

I'm hoping the fall/winter will have less buyers out making the bidding wars less since sales usually go down int he winter months.  Because right now about 90% of the homes in the area I want are short-sales.

Message Edited by NewHope on 08-10-2009 11:37 AM

[Anonymous]

So i made an offer to the Short Sale home and my Realtor asked for 2 checks,  $1000 EMD and $70 Option money , so even if my offer gets accepted , i can still back out within 7 days.

Problem solved.