With a husband whose job required frequent transfers, Linda Kody dealt with more than her fair share of real estate agents – and when she started feeling like she could do a better job than the people she was dealing with, she got into the game herself.

It wasn’t long, however, before she began to make a specialty of dealing with bank-owned and foreclosed properties, and now teaches certification courses for fellow Realtors who need to know how to navigate a short sale. In the past few years, her skill-set has been more in demand than ever.

Linda Kody

Title: Broker/Owner of Kody & Co. in North Andover

Age: 60

Experience: 25 years

Did you get into foreclosures right away, or did that come along after?

You know, it’s kind of funny. I got into real estate just probably as it was peaking – 1985. It had peaked, and it was going down a little bit. And somebody had said to me at one point, they were soliciting in the neighborhood and they said, “We’ll give you $400,000 for your house.” And I said, you’ve got to be kidding me. Something’s not right here. You could see that it was going to burst. At the time I was working for Carlson Real Estate. I could see it happening, spoke to somebody about it and we started soliciting banks, seeing that it was going to be coming. I applied to be a Fannie Mae broker [and] applied to be a HUD broker, and got Bank of New England as a client. And that was 1989.

Do you see any differences now between the way things are now and the way they were then?

A lot of differences. The tragedy’s the same. People are losing their homes. But people are much more techno-savvy now. More people are impacted now. The attitudes of people are a little bit different now. There’s a lot of entitlement issues right now – ‘I should be rescued, I should be saved.’ There’s a lot of that. And some of it’s justified, but some of it, maybe it isn’t. People forget that they have personal responsibility. If I sign my name on a loan, it’s my responsibility, I agreed to pay it. And you don’t see as much of that. It’s like ‘Make it go away.’ You didn’t see the short sales that we have right now. Maybe one or two, but that was not something that was prevalent at all.

Which do you find easier to work on?

There’s a lot of back end stuff with a foreclosure, but at least you know [the bank is] going to sell it. They may not be able to sell it today, [the property] might have a title issue. But they will sell it. In a short sale, you can work a year and still not know the outcome.

The government programs all go by the same guidelines to qualify people for short sales. But doesn’t every bank have their own procedures for qualification? Are there similarities?

Well, you can’t have assets, you have to have sustainability. You can’t be millions of dollars upside down, it has to be a reasonable amount of money. And you have to show how you’re going to be able to do it. The biggest thing is, people do have assets, and they don’t want to touch them, that’s the sacred money. Somebody called me and wanted to do a modification or a short sale on the residence he’s living in right now, but he owns four other houses. I was like, that wouldn’t be an option for you. ‘But why isn’t it? My house is upside down.’ Because you have assets. You’re able to make it liquid, make it whole. [People have] a lot of misconceptions.

Have you worked with foreclosures and bank-owned property your whole career?

If you’re in real estate, you flow with the market. After 25 years you get to recognize the trends as they’re coming. And that’s the beauty of a small company, you can turn on a dime. I’m always studying the market and looking where the trends are. [During the boom,] we had gone back to a more traditional brokerage. We did a lot of buyer brokerage. And then – you could just see this bubble getting ready to burst, you could see it coming. And so I went back and started talking to my banks again, that I had always dealt with, got back into the broker price opinion business. I knew that was going to be a big part of it. So we positioned ourselves before it happened.

What were the signs?

Same signs as the last time. When somebody would pay an obscene amount of money, and it was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I can remember thinking, back in the late 80s, ‘Nobody will ever pay $400,000 again for a three-family in Lawrence, in my lifetime.’ And in 2005? We had stated-income loans. We had negative amortization loans, no asset verification, so that people who should never have ended up getting loans got loans… and we had $400,000, three-families in Lawrence. And I said, ‘it’s coming.’ But they kept holding it off. I don’t know how they do it. But you could see the numbers weren’t working, and it had to pop. It just had to. When nobody can afford to buy a home, then something’s wrong.

Kody’s Top Five Tips For Successfully Completing A Short Sale: 

1. Do a thorough intake interview with the seller.
2. Position the property properly – and be able to intelligently justify your pricing.
3. Make sure the house is in show condition, and the sellers maintain that commitment.
4. From the beginning, talk to the owner about where they’re going to go after the sale.
5. Make sure the buyer’s agent has educated the buyer as to what the process will be.