By Scott Burns

Sarasota, Florida. As I listened to Kristen Hertel and Deby Mascolino tell their story I kept thinking of Dr. George Vaillant. I had gone to see Ms. Hertel about her real estate business, but the underlying story is about resilience and adaptation, two human qualities that are a lot more important than money, investing or real estate. Dr. Vaillant is the curator of the only long-term studies of human development, studies that have followed several groups of people for more than 70 years. If those studies have a conclusion it is that resilience and adaptation, rather than anything else you can name, are the difference between being among the “happy-well” or the “sad,-sick.”

Here’s the story. Before the real estate crash Ms. Hertel says she was “a-well paid employee of a large real estate brokerage firm” with 24 years of experience. She did the work related to titles and closings at the firm. So when closings disappeared, so did her job.

Read here for a column about Sarasota during the boom.

She responded by getting a variety of licenses and going out on her own, but with an odd twist. Rather than try to swim against the tide of declining sales, she started four small companies that offer different services in real estate. One offers the title and closing services she did before. Another, Real Estate Assistants, LLC, is a kind of outsourcing service that provides support for busy realtors. Those businesses show her resilience.

But the other two businesses are all about adaptation. In a terrible market, she would participate in the boom that arose from the bust: short sales. She would be part of making things happen. She would provide sellers and their realtors with all the services needed to move a short sale to completion and another company would do the actual negotiations with the bank, relieving both the seller and realtor of the task. One is called Short Sale Referrals, LLC that links short sale buyers with short sales. The other is called Advanced Short Sale Negotiators, LLC. (A short sale in real estate occurs when the sale price of the property is insufficient to pay off the mortgage. When that happens, the seller must bring a check to the closing or the lender must accept a lower amount as payoff. Getting that agreement isn’t easy.)

Ms. Hertel says their success rate in short sale negotiations is close to 95 percent.

The importance of short sales is demonstrated by some of the figures provided by the Sarasota Association of Realtors. In addition to tracking monthly figures of sales volume and median sale price for single family homes and condominiums, the Association divides each category into conventional “Arm’s length” transactions, short sales and REOs, the foreclosed properties known as “real estate owned.”

In November, distressed property sales accounted for 41.3 percent of all sales, down from a peak of 51 percent in the second quarter of 2010. In the same month the inventory-to-sales ratio was about 8 months. That’s more inventory than sellers and realtors want, but way better than forever.

When I ask if there is a profile for short sellers Deby Mascolino shakes her head. “We get people who are only $10,000 short. They can be people who don’t have $10,000 but they have to move for a new job.” She also says that prices vary and go as high as $5 million.

When I ask what the hardest part of the job is, the immediate answer is “the paperwork.”

“People are often depressed. They want to throw in the towel. And it’s a lot of paperwork.” Ms. Mascolino says.

In fact, a short sale takes about as much paperwork for the seller as applying for a mortgage: 2 years of tax returns, 2 months of pay stubs, 2 months of bank statements, a listing of all other financial assets, a hardship letter explaining the reason for the short sale, all the property disclosures, a real estate listing and all the photos for an MLS listing.

Although she has handled short sales in 30 states, Ms. Hertel is aware that she isn’t alone and that banks’ ability to deal with short sales has improved significantly over the last few years. She is particularly positive about equator.com, an online system that Bank of America adopted to facilitate short sales. (If reader mail is any indication, it is a great improvement over the chaos that early would-be short sellers experienced.)

Will she be out of business when the real estate market finally recovers? Somehow, I doubt it. She’ll adapt and find a new way to help make things happen.