mechanics of a short sale?

What exactly is a short sale?

How do you get the money? Or is it really an assumption?

Does this require good credit?

Why would a bank do a short sale on a loan that is not in arrears? I had a Realtor friend of a potential seller that I was looking at for a L/O or subto but he said I should do a short sale. I thought a short sale was for foreclosure type properties, the seller was not behind.

Is there a good course that anyone would recommend. I get a lot of email from gurus offering short sale courses.

This link will answer this question:
http://www.foreclosurenegotiations.org/ss/overview_1.html

There are a couple different ways to get paid doing a short sale. It really depends on the specifics of the deal. For me the easiest way is a simple third party payout.

It does not require YOU to have good credit. When I did my first short sale I was still recovering from a nasty divorce from 4 years prior. My credit score was below 500. Yet I still purchased a property for $50k, put $7k in rehab into it, and sold it for $105k. I used a HML for the purchase and rehab money. I paid $6k for the HML.

This link will answer this question:
http://www.foreclosurenegotiations.org/ss/banks.html

In addition: A bank will accept a short sale if the homeowner is not yet in foreclosure and even if there has never been a payment missed.

I just finished up with a guy who owned 17 rental properties. He had reached the end of his rope and decided he was going to stop making the payments on all the properties. I started the short sale process and completed 8 successful short sales before any of them missed their first payment.

The banks will do this based on proof that the properties will end up in foreclosure. Their hopes are that they will loose less money by short sale than if they let them all go to foreclosure.

P.S. this was with 5 different banks between the 17 properties.

I have never found just one place that gave all the answers that I needed. The information I used when I got started was a combination of different programs I purchased and whatever I could obtain from others generous guidance.