For a financially struggling homeowner, the decision to pursue a short sale does not come easily. Homeowners who make that choice generally do so after months of searching and pleading for an alternative that would have kept them in the home.

Even when it goes smoothly, the short-sale process is painful for sellers. When it’s bumpy and slow, the pain is far worse. Far too many short sales have been plagued by false starts, confusion, delays and disappointments.

Short-sellers’ many encounters with insult upon injury stem from a combination of problems, including sellers’ lack of experience with the process and lenders’ initial reluctance to adopt on a mass scale what they had long considered an obscure means of resolving bad mortgage debts.

A Scottsdale resident, said one of the Larger Banks finally approved her short-sale application after 10 months of frustration and uncertainty. But the pain didn’t stop there. The sale finally went, but the bank reported the short sale as a foreclosure on the person’s credit reports, which is not easy to fix.

Big mortgage lenders such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo are still smoothing out the wrinkles in their respective solutions to making short sales faster and more reliable. But they are now taking short sales very seriously and have made many improvements, one bank representative said.

Just as the average homeowner never imagined losing a home to financial hardship, the average mortgage lender never dreamed the bank would have to set up an assembly line to churn out short-sale approvals.

Many banks after an overload of complaints has devised a new system.

Bank of America has implemented an automated system – the first of its kind – for tracking the progress of short sales and has reduced the average number of days it takes for a short-sale to be approved, from 90 days to just over 50 days.

The bank approved 18,000 short-sale applications in April, says a Bank representative.

Unfortunately, it received more than 50,000 short-sale applications that month.

“Our system was never designed to handle this kind of volume,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president and chief economist at RealtyTrac, based in Irvine, Calif., which collects and analyzes nationwide data on short-sales and foreclosures. “Short sales were never intended to be a mass-market product.”

So what can we do now? InvestorCompsOnline is dedicated to teaching real-estate professionals how to be more effective at negotiating short sales, how to create their business plan so that they can financially maintain their investments, and how to pick markets to wisely invest in.

In today’s real estate market, property investors look at specific ARV as the end-goal that their investment property must reach. However, in the last few years, it seems that this “ARV goal post” was in constant movement. How do you reach a goal when they keep moving the goal posts?

2008 and 2009 were frustrating years. As market values started to slide, the ARV that you’ve determined today could not hold by the time you acquire your property and had it rehabbed. That $120,000 ARV that you’ve correctly determined in December, could possibly not be valid “according to the bank” by the following March. In a matter of 2 to 3 months, when it was time to refinance or sell your property, the bank has determined that your ARV was actually now around $108,000 – a nice 10% drop! A constant frustration.

So, what is ARV? Well, it’s exactly what After Repair Value means, the value of your property after it’s been rehabbed and ready to be flipped or rented. That’s the number that will determine your return on investment – of course assuming that your other costs have been accurate.

Often we receive questions from investors that they have looked on various online real estate websites, such as Zillow and the value of the home they have is either too high or too low. Why they ask? Because Free data is worth just what you pay for it… NADA.

Well, it doesn’t matter what Zillow or willow or schmillow say the ARV is. What matters is WHAT DO THE COMPS IN THE AREA SHOW THE ARV IS. Pull the data from your InvestorCompsOnline account and analyze them with these top three things in mind: year built, square footage, and room count.

The typical comp parameters for real estate is at least three (3) sales of similar property as the subject home, within the past 6 months, within a mile of the subject property. If you can’t find 3 sales, then the parameters are expanded incrementally.

Make sure you are using the right numbers before you decide to get involved with a deal. Use your InvestorCompsOnline account and the support desk if you are having any difficulties.

Over the last couple weeks, we have had some difficulties lately with the InvestorCompsOnline system. Despite the struggle, we were able to keep our members well informed, pull their necessary data, assist in analyzing their deals, and continue to provide the excellent service they have grown to expect from our InvestorCompsOnline staff.

We took this time as an opportunity to develop InvestorCompsOnline Version 2.0! We are pleased and excited to announce its launch! You will notice when you visit our site our new and improved look… BUT that’s not all that has been improved.

When you visit our new site you will now, a the click of your mouse, be able to learn all about Mark Jackson (MJ), the founder of InvestorCompsOnline, get help from our support staff, and access our new blog where MJ provides tons of FREE real estate investing help and discusses topics of interest to your growing business.

Your account is now accessible by clicking the “member login” button. Here you will still get all the great data and customer service you received before.

So, welcome to the New and Improved, but still same great service, InvestorCompsOnline version 2.0. Visit the site today and take a look around.

At all of our InvestorCompsOnline conventions, boot camps, or seminars the issue of marketing comes up at least once if not a hundred times. Someone will mention Facebook (which is a whole different story) and this is always closely followed by a comment about Twitter. So, we at InvestorCompsOnline decided to do the research for you to determine is Twitter worth it? If it IS worth it, how can investors best use it for profitable results? First, let’s look at just what Twitter is and what it can do for your advertising efforts.

Twitter.com is a site where an investor can create a profile and become a “micro-blogger” Twitter is like a typical blog (aka web-log) in that it lets you say anything you want to say to anyone and everyone who will view it – with one exception. Twitter only allows a subscriber to express themselves 140 characters at a time. So it’s a kind of like using you cell phone to send the world a brief text message. When you locate a profile of someone whose “tweets” you are interested in, you can “follow” them – whenever they post anything new, it will be visible on your Twitter home page. If anyone finds YOUR profile and follows YOU, then you will be alerted that someone is “following” you. Now that you are aware of the basics, let’s discuss making this a powerful and PROFITABLE tool for you.

Because the old saying “Out of sight, out of mind” is absolutely true, you’ll need to remain active with your “tweeting”. InvestorCompsOnline suggest you should be posting at a minimum, once a day. Find something to “tweet” specific to real estate – something that your “followers” will find useful. If you just start sending info about homes you have for sale, it probably will not get you as far as you planned. Think about it this way – when was the last time you opened and really read an email from someone attempting to sell you something?

If you give your followers information they can use or information they find interesting (even if it ISN’T about real estate) then you’ll have an opportunity to keep their attention. When you gain their trust, they’ll be more willing to consider what you have to say when you do offer them a property you have listed.

Twitter, like other social networking sites, is a wonderful way to network and connect with people – just keep in mind that they are real people and desire to be respected and treated like real people. They aren’t dollar signs. So connect when someone follows you, send them a short personal “tweet” letting them feel you appreciate them.

Remember that being real with others and giving thoughtful content is what Twitter is made for – the profit will follow if you treat people like people and post routinely so that your Twitter marketing is constantly on the radar! The more you “Tweet”, the larger your following will become – and the larger your following, the better your opportunities of communicating with a person who is interested in making a deal – which, of course, means a greater opportunity for you to profit!

The first three Monday’s of the month InvestorCompsOnline conducts its “Free Call in Days”. Yesterday’s call was great! There were some really great questions and discussed the issues investors have with finding buyers.

We thought the call was so informative we decided to offer it to you. Click here to listen in on yesterdays call.