Conventional wisdom holds that the way to find a great real estate deal is to look for a distressed seller. As a result, short sales have gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. Potential buyers who are considering making an offer on a short sale should be aware of the realities of short sale transactions and know what pitfalls to avoid.

Due to the nature of the current real estate market, there have rarely been so many terrific deals available to home buyers. Many people consider short sales to be great opportunities for buyers. In reality, short sales, by their nature, are usually not especially good deals for anyone involved. A short sale is not necessarily a better deal than a traditional listing.

Short sales are, in fact, a last-ditch effort designed to keep the seller and the lender from ending up with even worse deals. At one time, short sales were protracted, frustrating experiences for buyers, who often ended up with nothing but an outdated pre-approval letter after months of waiting. Recent legislation has improved things somewhat by requiring banks to determine their minimum acceptable net proceeds and respond to offers within 10 days, but it’s important to remember that short sales are not intended to benefit the buyer.

Short sales are only an option when a homeowner owes more money than the home is actually worth and does not have any way to get the money to make up the difference at closing. The idea is that the buyer doesn’t end up with a foreclosure in her financial history and the bank that made the unfortunate choice to finance the original purchase avoids the expense and risks of foreclosure.

Buyers often assume that, because the sellers have agreed to accept less than what they owe on the home, it will sell for less than market value. Many people liken short sales to liquidation sales and assume that the object of a short sale is to unload the home in a hurry at a discount. This is not the case. When banks agree to short sales, they do so reluctantly because, in a short sale, the lender often ends up agreeing to relieve the sellers of their financial responsibility for the shortfall.

The bank knows that the house may be worth less than the borrower owes on it, and they may be willing to accept an offer that leaves them in the red. However, there is no reason for the bank to accept less than the market value of the home. From the bank’s point of view, the home’s market value is already a discounted price.

As part of the short sale process, the fair market value of the home is established through the use of comparables and/or appraisals. The idea is to determine what the home is actually worth and settle for that amount. Because the home’s value is based entirely on the selling prices of similar homes in the same area, a buyer is not usually going to get a better price on a short sale than on similar homes in the area.

Revenue for the year to the end of March was up by 52% to £339.7m, with international sales rising by 142%. Many shoppers look for an Asos discount code.

Pre-tax profit was £15.7m against £20.3m the previous year, due to £12.9m of relocation costs. Taking out these costs, profits rose 41% to £28.6m.

The company said it remained on track to hit £1bn of sales by 2015.

You can choose in the options what it takes for a writer to appear, by selecting x posts in y days. Maybe you want 1 post in the last week, 3 in the last month, 12 in the last year – its completely up to you.

Everything is automated. When a writer qualifies, their link will appear without any input from you. If they ever no longer qualify, their link will simply vanish until they qualify again.

In the settings you can select any writers that you want to block from the list. You can also choose whether it displays sitewide or homepage only.

To install it, simply copy the php file to your “plugins” folder. Activate it as a plugin, then go to Widgets (under Appearance) and drag it to where it needs to go. You can change any settings under “WP Contributors” in Settings.

The “powered by” credit link is completely optional.  It is Off as standard, but if you’d like to help support us then feel free to tick the box to display the link

You can download the plugin here. I’ll leave comments on for this one, feel free to ask any questions or leave any feedback.

(click to enlarge)

All that anyone has to do to view all this personal information is visit this url – http://ukbanners.com/cgibin/shortfall.cgi

Looks like a massive own goal to leave all this information out in the public.  The same security issue also affects their other websites – ukbuttons.com and cheekybanners.com.

Hovering over the username on that page showed their login name and password. Its unbelievable that they would show all this information on a publicly accessible page, but to then store passwords unencrypted is simply bizarre.

With those login details anyone can login and request payments, edit banners etc.  Lets see if they fix it before this post goes live (I’m emailing them and warning them this has been published to appear tomorrow, 4th June)

This post is going to be lengthy, so I apologise in advance for that – no way around it as there is a lot going on in this scam, but I hope it will help you falling into any traps when you are out building links. We’ll be going from the sleazy link sales forums, to hacked Egyptian government sites and beyond, so I hope you find it interesting.

It all started when a client emailed me the contents of a private message from someone trying to sell them a pagerank 9 link:

PAGERANK 9 Link Sales

We are selling links from very strong PR9 site.

Site language : English – US IP
Duration : monthly / 3 months / 6 months / Yearly

all links visible. no blogpost,hidden or hack.

Pm me if you are serious buyer.Prices not cheap

You can read the original sale offer thread here. I would have done this post without actual url’s, but when you attempt to use criminal activity to rip off one of my clients, then you lose the right to having your url’s kept hidden.

The pagerank 9 in question is http://universitevetoplum.com/, which appears to be a Hungarian campus of a USA college.

The pagerank appears to be valid:

So lets take a look at its backlinks:

Pagerank 9 – www.mohp.gov.eg – Egypts Ministry of Health
Pagerank 8 – www.ukzn.ac.za – South African University homepage
Pagerank 8 – www.presidency.gov.eg/index.html – Egyptian Presidents homepage
Pagerank 7 – www.caricomlaw.org – Official Caribbean Law site
Pagerank 7 – www.asil.org – The American Society of International Law Home Page

At this point, the original link for sale would certainly pass a quick examination – its pagerank is technically legit, and it has a handful of extremely strong  backlinks pointing at it.

Lets examine each of those backlinks in detail:

www.mohp.gov.eg – Look at what can be seen in the source code: (warning: some of the links in it are nsfw, I would advise not typing them in your browser…)

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So within the Egypt Ministry of Health pagerank 9 website, we have 6 links to mainly nsfw Turkish websites, and the pagerank 9 in question.  The links are completely hidden from view, you cannot see them on the page itself.

www.ukzn.ac.za – This site is down right now, but you can view its Google cache.  Then in the source code we have (click to enlarge):

So here we have a large international university, again linking to the pr9 in question, and yet more Turkish porn sites.

www.presidency.gov.eg/index.html – In the source of this one we have two separate lots of hidden links:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

This time they’ve opted to hide a bunch of them by using a 15 x 15 white image (on a white background) to disguise the fact there is a link present. Again the links point to the PR9 site along with yet more Turkish porn.

www.caricomlaw.org – In the source of this one we have:

Click to enlarge

Yet more links to Turkish porn and our original site in question.

www.asil.org - So onto the source of the final one:

Click to enlarge

I’m sure it won’t be a surprise at this point – a link to the pr9, and some more NSFW turkish stuff. This time they have opted to use a 0 pixel size link to hide the facts the links are there. Again you cannot see them on the page.

It is amazing all of this is still working in 2010 – Its hardly rocket science to detect links hidden with css, or white squares on a white background as the linking image, or images set to size “width=0″.  And it is undoubtedly working, since we can see the pagerank all flowing into http://universitevetoplum.com/, where the links are being sold for $650 per month.

Illegal? Sure. Profitable? Undeniably.

I hope anyone reading has learned a little from this on how to check links and make sure everything is as it seems – remember this doesn’t only need to apply to extremely high pagerank links. I would bet if these criminals applied the same tactics to get lower pagerank sites, it could go on forever unnoticed.

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