The Joe Cocker Short Sale in Rancho Cordova

Sometimes, I get a short sale to sell that throws me a curve ball. Especially when it’s a tenant-occupied short sale and the tenant won’t cooperate. Oh, they will promise to cooperate, and they’ll even give this Sacramento short sale agent a key for the lockbox and let me publish in MLS a cell phone number, but they have no intention of cooperating with showings. What is it? My smiling face? They can’t say “no” to my face? But behind my back they are thinking forget her and the horse she road in on?

I put this Rancho Cordova short sale on the market more than a year ago, and for the first 3 or 4 months, I couldn’t show it because the tenant refused to let agents inside. He stuck a big sign on the door: PITBULLS INSIDE, and refused to answer the door. I was very relieved when the seller finally booted the guy to the curb. Unfortunately, my lockbox vanished with the tenant.

The seller is in the military. Stationed overseas. He had been fighting his investor Freddie Mac for several years, trying to deal with his underwater home. There are several bright spots in this, actually. First, the military gets special treatment in a short sale. Foreclosure is generally not gonna happen. Not to mention, if one hasn’t made a mortgage payment in several years, one’s odds of getting a short sale granted by the bank are very high.

While I waited for the seller’s family member to mail me a key, I began receiving phone calls from eager buyer’s agents who were very anxious to show the home. Their options were a) crawl in through the bathroom window or b) wait for me to put a lockbox on it. The lock was broken on the bathroom window. One agent crawled through the bathroom window and called back to report that squatters were living in the house. Nope, that’s just the way it looks. Another agent yelled at me that she was most certainly NOT crawling in through the bathroom window and hung up on me.

Well, I guess she’s not selling that home then. Short sales present different levels of difficulty and challenges. Ordinarily, I would never ask an agent to crawl through a bathroom window, but this was the least of the problems inherent with this particular home. An agent who would not or could not navigate a small obstacle such as an access barrier probably would not survive dealing with the upfront repairs a lender would require just to get the loan funded, nor be willing to deal with a 203K for the roof and other repair issues. This was a fixer short sale in Rancho Cordova, which are not the easiest short sales to sell.

Finally received a key, I gained access, attached a lockbox and secured the back window. But by then we were in escrow. We were in escrow with the agent and the buyer who were willing to crawl in through the bathroom window. Obtaining short sale approval from IndyMac, now One West, and Freddie Mac was relatively fast, given that particular combination of servicer and investor. We received approval in fewer than 30 days! But that was at the end of April. We didn’t close escrow until the end of August. It took that buyer 4 months to fund and record a 203K.

Unfreakin’ believable. If this had been any other bank and any other situation, this short sale would have started over. Our negotiator at One West was such a nice guy. I don’t ordinarily use the words “nice guy” and “bank negotiator” in the same sentence. But this fellow was accommodating. Which was a good thing because the guy at the Franchise Tax Board was a far cry from a nice guy or even a guy whom I’d call a public servant, although our taxes pay his salary. He was more the male version of Lily Tomlin’s phone operator, one ringy dingy. He made us send him HUD after HUD after HUD and came up with a bunch of idiotic reasons why he would not issue the partial tax release.

But in the end, patience and teamwork won. Just like always. Just like every short sale I close in Sacramento. I think I had 6 days before my listing expired. Many happy parties. In this particular Rancho Cordova short sale, it took an army to close it. And some of us, still can’t get that Joe Cocker tune out of our heads this morning.