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becoming the resolution of choice as we make our way out of the crisis.
Historically shunned by creditors, short sales are
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voluntarily is through the free market." He wasn't a winner of the economics Nobel and on Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Board for nothing.
t is tough to put one over on the free marketplace. When functioning properly, it tends to right things off balance, turn shoddy products into good ones, and eliminate bad ideas in favor of those that work. Absent undue outside influences, people will find the best deals. As the legendary Milton Friedman once observed, "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together
by servicers as bad ideas, as were all notions that involved lender concessions on principal balances and earned interest. But even though the mortgage marketplace is not truly a free one per se, its participants are frequently able to find ideas that work in emergencies, and that'
Not that long ago, short sales were thought of
with short sales. Few concepts have found as much traction since 2008: and at this time, short sales light the way as we struggle to find the best path out of this economic crisis. Friedman also famously observed, "There
s what happened
is no such thing as a free lunch." Indeed there is not; arriving at this point in the evolution of the short sale is not without price or pain, but it's easily been worth the ordeal in the minds of most observers.
afford them are in the homes that were formerly in distress, and their previous owners sustained less damage. Lenders and investors who stood to lose a great deal actually lost substantially less, and instead of wallowing in a bottomless bog of properties, we turned the corner on values. Short sales helped make it happen, and it is a matter of common sense that it worked out that way—or more precisely, uncommon sense. Short sales became an uncommonly sensible
strategy after we figured out as an industry how to make them work. They have been rising since the beginning of the year after taking a brief downturn of 5 percent between Q4 2011 and Q1 2012, from 63,257 to 59,946, according to figures from the Office of the Comptroller of
51 The reality today is that more people who can
