Email ElizabethAnother Bank of America FHA Short Sale
You can tell me the buyer is canceling the short sale, and when I’m looking out on this view, I’m only half as annoyed as I normally would be. This is the view from my balcony at the St. Regis in Bora Bora. They put up the orange cones to keep the drunken jet ski drivers from running over naked swimmers. Not that it does any good. When jet skiers get disoriented, there is no telling where they might end up. Just like buyers of short sales. Hard to say. They start out saying they want to buy a short sale but then when approval arrives, lots of them tend to freak out.
As though it’s all fun and games while they are waiting for short sale approval. They can run around and boast to friends: “Look at me, I am buying a short sale. Hey, I have a lampshade on my head.” But when it comes time to put pedal to the metal, some of them just can’t do it. Is it because they’ve had too long to think about it? In a regular escrow, they would be closed within 30 to 45 days, not sitting in limbo waiting for short sale approval. Is it because they forgot they were in escrow? It’s not like there is constant activity that they can see, unless they follow updates on my website.
In one escrow, the dreaded Bank of America FHA short sale escrow, we’ve been working on the file since April. That’s not unusual for a Bank of America FHA short sale. It’s par for the course. Other lenders can process FHA short sales in a normal time period, but that has not been the case with Bank of America. We closed 2 or 3 other B of A FHA short sales recently, and each was almost a year-long process. Because getting the approval from HUD is difficult for B of A. And by the time the bank analyzes the offer, another 4 months have passed and the ATP has expired. So, they start over. Those falling over “for sale” signs in people’s yards are due more to the lengthy process for a Bank of America FHA short sale than from buyers canceling.
Fortunately, Bank of America is moving its FHA short sales to Equator shortly. We hope this happens by its target date of February. It will be a joyful day to celebrate when that happens.
But in this particular Bank of America FHA short sale that we’ve been working on since April and just received approval on 5 days ago — well, the buyer up and canceled yesterday. The agent says it was due to the “whole house inspection” as though we need some kind of excuse. We don’t need no stinkin’ excuse. Just send the cancellation and muddle on with your life. We will sell this home again, and this time to a serious buyer. Or, so this Sacramento short sale agent continues to hope.
Arrival at The St. Regis at Bora Bora
Ants, teeny-tiny, itty-bitty ants are crawling around my keyboard. They are zipping in and out, over and around. They are doing somersaults in delight. And I’m just thankful they are not those little lizards. My husband says I should AEL — Always Expect Lizards. But they still freak me out when they show up unexpectedly. It’s not like they crawl with a purpose. They are not determined lizards. They change their mind in a flash about the direction they are headed and all of a sudden, there they are, looking up at you quizzically, like a bank short sale negotiator who doesn’t bat an eyelash over taking 6 months to process a short sale.
Today we are at the St. Regis at Bora Bora. Air Tahiti does not fly directly to Bora Bora from Rangiroa, although it does fly from Bora Bora to Rangiroa. I was told by a tour operator in the islands that our vacation needed to “progress,” to get substantially better, which is why we could not fly the other way around. Which meant to get to Bora Bora from Rangiroa, we needed to return to Papeete on Tahiti, retrieve our luggage, and then go back through Security to board a flight to Bora Bora.
I did not see how it could get any better than Rangiroa. Our overwater bungalow at Kia Ora was stunningly beautiful, modern, and it had just been remodeled. What could possibly be better than looking out on the warm sapphire waters and endless horizon? First, there is no bumpy van ride from the airport to the hotel. In Bora Bora, you are transported via a yacht. Second, I can’t say the view at Bora Bora is any better. On the one side we have the island, and on the other we have the mountains, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that view. The water is a pale pearly greenish blue. Although, you can see a portion of your neighbor’s bungalow, which you could not at Kia Ora. I feel homesick for Rangiroa already. I felt a strong connection to that atoll.
However, our overwater bungalow villa at St. Regis at Bora Bora holds no candle to Kia Ora. We have our own bedroom, which is enormous, lots of island thatch, wood, bamboo, ceiling fans, cathedral ceiling and sliding doors to the deck. A separate bath is also enormous with a walk-in open shower and a rainshower head as big as a Super Bowl pizza, situated next to a sunken and jetted tub, plus wood floors, dual stone sinks. There is requisite glass-in-the-floor windows, too. But we also have a separate living room / dining room. We had to take a golf cart shuttle to get here from the restaurant last night because it is so far away from the lobby. I bet it’s a 3/4 mile. Most guests grab bicycles. But a nice unexpected feature is the fact we have our own butler. He offered to unpack for us last night.
Would you let a butler unpack your suitcases?
Our butler motioned toward the table where a tray of chocolates and a box of chocolates and a bottle of champagne awaited consumption. But the ants had gotten to them first. That’s what we got for going to dinner before settling in. I am thankful that my cold has pretty much cleared up, and our sunburn pain has been minimized somewhat. Not enough that we could, say, enjoy a Swedish massage, but we’re here for two more weeks. Stuff can change.
Gauguin’s Pearl Farm in Rangiroa
It is Christmas morning and I have, temporarily, no Internet. Our entire covered balcony deck is wet, and the table where I set my laptop has puddles. Rain during the night must have crept in sideways over the rails and under our thatched roof. The wind had been strong enough to throw an empty Coke Light can against the door, but not so strong as to whip an empty bottle of our Spanish Baron De Castaneda from the table. Is it still paradise at Kia Ora Resort on Rangiroa?
Let me check. I hum a few bars of She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain, and yup, my voice is much better. I’ve been nursing a progressive cold for the past 5 days. Check. Sunburned back acquired from walking across the reef from the Blue Lagoon to Bird Island without wearing sunscreen. We made an emergency trip into Avatoru yesterday to the pharmacy to get an ointment with special properties beyond Aloe Vera, and it’s much less red and botchy today. The pain has subsided. Check. Hair. My hair is a tangled, twisted, poofy and swollen blob looking very much like Lyle Lovett hair crossed with Albert Einstein’s. Who gives a rats about my rat-nest hair but rats? Check.
My husband is ready to pull out his hair if he has to hear Dean Martin or Bing Crosby sing any more Christmas carols at the restaurant. It’s sheer torture to him, and the smiling French Polynesian waitresses have no clue. The words to those songs are complete lies, he says. There is no marshmallow world. I suspect he thinks of the world as evil and corrupt and doesn’t buy the pretty pictures painted by anybody, especially not by crooners from the 1960s and their ilk. I am much more hopeful for the world. Especially after our visit yesterday to the Gauguin’s Pearl Farm to witness the miracle of the birth of black pearls.
Because we don’t speak French, we had a private tour of the farm, which pretty much consisted of: here is a technician operating on the oysters, and here is the lagoon where we put the oysters to bed. Perhaps a better term for the technician would be doctor, I wonder? If they are calling the act of slicing open the appendix, inserting a pearl, followed by a graft from a donor oyster, an operation, then the person performing the operation should be a doctor.
Gauguin’s Pearl Farm gets their pearls from the bottom of the Mississippi River in America. The pearls are small, very round, and they cover them in an antiseptic of sorts that is a pale lemon yellow. The grafts are very tiny, at least four times smaller than a sliver of clipped fingernail, a teeny rectangle. A different crew of workers push a plastic wedge into the oyster, which props it open just enough for a technician to peer into its opening. Using a tweezer type of instrument, the technician inserts the pearl, followed by the graft, into the open wound. Then, the oyster is tied to others and then placed into a pocket of the net bag. Each oyster occupies its own pocket. This way, if the pearl is not accepted by the oyster and is instead rejected, it will fall into the netting, and that oyster can be removed from production.
It takes a long time to make a black pearl. First, the oyster has to be at least 3 years old to be of age to produce a pearl. The pearl itself takes at least 2 years to create. By the time you hold a first generation pearl in your hand, 5 years have passed. That’s a long time for investors to wait, sighed our tour guide. Second-generation pearls, the larger size, take another 2 years, and the really large pearls, the third generation, well, an oyster will have invested 9 years of its life. That’s assuming no predators have eaten the oyster by then.
The real estate business in Sacramento is a much safer investment than pearl farming.
The Blue Lagoon and Bird Island at Rangiroa
My sister in Minnesota sent an email yesterday to say that she was expecting to receive a ton of snow shortly and temperatures were slated to break a 90-year record low. Then, this morning, she said the newscaster misread her prompter. Apparently, the record low temperatures were only going to be beat those from the ’90s, not from 90 years ago. Of course, to that weather girl it probably seems like 90 years ago because she was most likely learning how to read and write in the 1990s.
It’s all in your perspective, I guess. When I was in school, a hundred years ago seemed like an eternity and today it’s like yesterday. Well, today it is almost is like yesterday. The older we get, the more time is put into perspective. Just like the more experiences we have, the greater our perspective because we have more information to draw upon.
I was thinking about a person’s perception of paradise. Tropical paradise, in particular. There are some people in this world who don’t give a hoot about a tropical paradise, people like my husband. People like this typically can take or leave paradise. Some of them actually hate it. My mother intensely despised the tropics and was very attached to freezers. The kind of freezer that I was supposed to strike with a table knife after placing inside steaming ice-cube trays filled with hot water to melt the accumulated ice. But I love a good tropical paradise. I prefer to think of myself as a more normal and balanced person.
In fact, I would like it if I was given a long assignment to search out the best tropical paradises in the world and to write about them. But no, I am simply a Sacramento real estate agent; an agent who sells a lot of short sales and hence can afford to go on vacation in French Polynesia this winter and leave her cats in the hands of housesitters.
Yesterday, we took a super long boat ride across the inside waters of the atoll, Rangiroa, from the town of Avatoru to a place called the Blue Lagoon, or Lagon Bleu. It’s a lagoon within a lagoon. How cool is that? We also visited Bird Island at Rangiroa.
It made me wonder how many shades of blue are there in the world? That’s what you think when you first step foot on the island and lay eyes on the most beautiful blue waters in the world. Azure. Soft blue pastel. Turquoise. Jade. Hypnotic and brilliant blues and greens. This is after dragging your bony and sunburned knees through the water to get past the reef and onto land itself. There is no sandy beach on which to land. The water is almost waist deep, and you’ve got to wear some type of foot covering for protection. Lemon sharks are circling you as well, but they didn’t seem hungry yesterday.
The guys from the boat loaded a huge cooler onto top of a surfboard anchored in the bay and dragged it to shore. It was filled with chicken, fish, salad fixings and stuff to drink. The crew set up a barbecue stand while the rest of us mostly swam around in the lagoon. A few brave souls ventured across the long reef to Bird Island. My husband and I were two of those. The water was littered with what looked from a distance to be gigantic dog turds, but they were actually black sea slugs. We were not about to step on them. We were also careful not to step on the coral and clams and other sea life, so it took us about 30 minutes to cross from the Blue Lagoon island to Bird Island. Like with most things, it’s not always about the destination, and it’s more about the journey. I just wished my journey would speed itself up a bit because I could feel the heat of the sun baking my back. Why did I not think to put sunscreen there?
I walked around the entire island, shuffling though shore waters when navigation on land became too difficult. My husband got lost halfway around. At one point I thought about going back to look for him but then I realized if he was hurt or having some kind of emergency, I could not possibly drag him back to the island by myself, so I should get help instead. He saw it as I left him there to die on a tropical paradise island.
What is wrong with that, I ask. There are worse places in the world to die than the Blue Lagoon or Bird Island at Rangiroa.
Overview of Kia Ora Resort
Something does not want us to sleep in, and my guess is it’s a bird. The last 2 days, we’ve heard a knocking sound before the sun rises. I suspect a bird lands on our balcony and pecks at the glass top over our rattan table. It’s four knocks in a row yet nobody yells out: hellllloooooooo, so our bets are on a bird. This rude awakening doesn’t bother me because I am an early riser and take it as my wake-up call, but my husband just pulls the covers over his head.
Our resort, Kia Ora, is one of those vacation spots that blends so well into the environment that you never want to leave. Some resorts can give you “resort fever,” making it imperative that you high tail it out to explore, but I could happily hang out here for days on end without the slightest bit of guilt or annoyance that I’m not driving around the atoll. It’s pretty much paradise everywhere you go, ocean on one side, lagoon on the other. Except the lagoon is so vast that you cannot see the other side, only the blue horizon.
Roosters crow every now and then, even way after sunrise. Fish splash as they jump out of the water, which makes the birds circle, squawking and diving, trying to catch them with their puny little feet. Yesterday, I spotted an eel swim past our lower-level deck. My favorites are the yellow butterfly fish and big blue groupers.
This is a diving and snorkeling destination for many people, this atoll in the Tuamoto Archipelago. The lagoon of Rangiroa is about 75 kilometers by 25 kilometers. Even though I don’t SCUBA, I can still watch the fish because the jade-colored and turquoise waters are so clear. The fish are so danged cute that I want to pet them. Some of them you can catch if you’re quick enough, and you can pet them as long as you pet them right direction. If you pet them in the wrong direction, you could get your hands cut up. Just like if you don’t watch where you are walking in the water, you could step on a sea urchin (ouch ouch) or squash a ray (triple ouch).
If I have any derogatory comments about the Kia Ora Resort, it would probably be the food. Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s as good as Paris or even as good as Tahiti. It’s all right, but it’s nothing exciting. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out what you’re getting. The waiter called it vegetable soup but it was really cream of celery. We ordered what we thought was a vegetable tray of carrot sticks and celery sticks, and it turned out to be a salad. It would help if we could read French. We only know the important words, like how to figure out whether it’s fish, beef or chicken.
Our meals are incredibly expensive for what you get. Even a Diet Coke is $5.00. It’s the same kind of Coke you get in Europe, Light and not Diet. So it tastes a little bit like Diet Coke watered down to Light. But I’m happy to get any kind of Diet Coke at all in the South Pacific. I’ll just say if you ever come here and decide to opt for the private dining in the air conditioned restaurant and blow a hundred bucks pp for a 3-course meal, don’t. They put forth an ambitious effort, but it’s not what you are probably expecting.
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