Who is Your Sacramento Short Sale Bank?

The seller’s mortgage lender is what will make or break the Sacramento short sale. Oh, sellers think it’s the value of their home or the dire circumstances detailed in the hardship letter, but none of that is as important as the short sale bank. Second to the Sacramento short sale bank is the investor. You can have a great short sale bank, for example, like Bank of America, but the investor can totally suck, like Fannie Mae.

When I talk to potential short sale sellers in the Sacramento area, the first question I ask is who is the lender. Generally, people don’t know if they have a Fannie Mae or a Freddie Mac loan. While they are busy vehemently denying their loan is held by Fannie Mae, I am busy running the address on my computer through Fannie Mae’s loan lookup site. By the time the seller finishes telling me how she is absolutely positive her loan is not held by Fannie Mae, I can find proof that Fannie Mae holds her loan.

It’s important to know whether the short sale bank has delegated authority or if the investor will be required to approve the short sale. All of these things are taken into consideration when giving a seller an estimated time frame to complete the short sale process. I’ve worked with so many banks that I’m often right on the nose with the amount of time it will take to do the short sale. I can look up my closings over the past year — I average about 10 short sale closings a month, more than 100 a year — and give my best guess based on how long it took me to do those short sales.

There is no reason for a bank to take longer than 10 days to approve a short sale. Seriously. But some banks routinely take 3 to 4 months. Some 6 to 8 weeks. And God forbid should a buyer walk away, many start over even though they swear it’s a soft decline, it’s not. It’s a do-over. Which is the dumbest thing ever. That’s ranks right up there with walking through an unmarked intersection blindfolded. It’s just stupid.

Here is a partial list of the banks / lenders this Sacramento short sale agent has closed short sales with, and I’m sure there are more that have slipped my mind. Some, perhaps, on purpose:

• Aurora Loan Services
• Bank of America
• Bayview Financial
• Carrington Financial
• CCO Mortgage
• Citimortgage, now One Main Financial
• Colonial National
• EMC Mortgage
• Flagstar
• First Horizon
• GMAC
• The Golden1 Credit Union
• Green Tree Financial
• Home Eq
• Horizon Bank
• HSBC
• IBM Lender Business Processing (LBPS)
• IndyMac
• JP Morgan Chase
• LCS
• Litton Loan Servicing
• M&T Bank
• Met Life
• National City Bank
• Nationstar
• Navy Federal Credit Union
• Ocwen Financial
• OneWest Bank
• PNC Bank
• Paleco Credit Union
• Saxon Mortgage
• Select Servicing Portfolio
• Seterus
• Specialized Loan Servicing
• Sun Trust
• US Bank
• United Bank
• United Guaranty
• Wachovia
• Wells Fargo Bank