SD Realtor – your post makes me think that the first person to offer on a short sale is the trail-blazer for a given property
for example, you and I submit an offer at $279K on this Normal Hts property – the bank might not accept anything less than $385K but we don’t know that until we make them an offer – I’m the type of person who will get pissed-off pretty quickly by this deceptive (IMO) marketing and I will walk away from the deal – but now you know the price point the bank will accept so you have a better shot of selling the property to someone else
of course, what are the chances that you have a 2nd buyer in hand who will be interested in the same property?
seems to me that the listing agent has an incentive to get an offer (almost any offer) to the bank as soon as possible – this first offer helps the listing agent find out how motivated the bank is and where the real short sale price might be – the desire to get an offer to the bank quickly might motivate the listing agent to list at a remarkably low price even though he doubts the bank will sell for that price
