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West Sacramento Police Demanded Listing Agent Stop Selling House
I was lucky they didn’t draw my face on their target practice.
It’s not every day the West Sacramento Police call me up and demand that I stop selling a house in West Sacramento. But that’s exactly what happened with this property. It wasn’t an easy sale to start with but very few are these days. The seller lived out of area and her family occupied the home. Her mom, daughter and son, and a few others. When I stopped by to shoot photos, the family was a bit uncooperative, and the daughter accused me of throwing her grandmother into the street. But the seller wanted me to sell the home, so sell the home I did.
We put it into escrow with an agent I knew from Folsom. His buyers were very excited. About this time is when a detective from the West Sacramento Police called. He insisted I cancel the escrow and remove my sign from the yard. And he wasn’t nice about it, either. He was demanding, beligerent and abrasive, but I’ve known worse in my life and he didn’t frighten me. I explained it’s not up to him to insist I cancel a listing. My contract is not with him. He insisted there was a criminal act happening, which sounded odd to me because even if the daughter filed a complaint doesn’t make it so. Where is the court order? Who has convicted her?
I wonder if the West Sacramento police aren’t a bit like the Wild Wild West. Yolo County is different than Sacramento, that’s for sure. Perhaps he thought agents are stupid because he’s married to one, LOL. I kept the listing. But weeks dragged by and the occupants were not allowing access to the buyer nor the buyer’s agent. In fact, the son had to cut the fence with a pair of wire cutters just so I could get inside the yard to obtain my lockbox. The buyer eventually canceled, and I forgot about the listing.
Fast forward to last month, a year later, and I received a call from a guy who found the listing in Zillow. Say what you want about Zillow advertising homes that are sold or unavailable, but this guy noticed the listing in Zillow had changed to a preforeclosure. That means there was a Notice of Default filed. I called the seller. Hey, big changes. Everybody had moved out, they are all friends again and everybody in the family is happy. All the charges had been dismissed, and there was a lot of kumbaya.
Only problem — we were very close to the auction date. Still, I know how to deal with these things. We ignored the lowball offers. Instead, we pulled a rabbit out of the hat and sold that house to an investor for cash. Closed a few days ago. I saved that seller from foreclosure. She got a little money, too. You’ve got to wonder why people don’t call. If I hadn’t called her, she would have had a foreclosure on her record. Well, it beats having the West Sacramento police call again.
How the Request for Notice of Default Lost a West Sacramento Seller Her Home
Filing a Request for Notice of Default is common practice for second lenders.
That Request for Notice of Default came in handy. A lawyer from Beverly Hills called yesterday to try to figure out how to save her home in West Sacramento from a trustee’s sale. I am certainly empathetic to those in this situation, but why do people call real estate brokers on the date of an auction? I can actually help if they were to call me a month or so before the sale date, but on the date of the sale, there isn’t much that can be done. For starters, I don’t give legal advice but I do have a lot of knowledge about foreclosure proceedings, primarily from my early days in the 1970s working first as a title searcher and later as an escrow officer. Many laws today are still similar.
This homeowner seemed confused as to how a credit union was able to grab her property and sell it at a trustee’s sale. It’s the Request for Notice of Default that did it this case. She had taken out a business loan, and used her home as collateral. I’m not sure if she understood that when you use a residence as collateral for a loan, the lender records a deed of trust, and that loan becomes a junior loan. When she fell behind on her payments on the existing mortgage, the Request for Notice of Default allowed the existing lender to alert the junior lien holder. Foreclosure laws give the second lender the right to make up the back payments and then file their own foreclosure proceedings under a Notice of Default.
The second lender can simply add the back payments to the amount they are owed and then foreclose for non-payment. That’s what this particular credit union did. The seller had filed a number of bankruptcies and tried to do a loan modification. In fact, she was in the middle of the loan modification when the credit union brought current the payments on the first mortgage. Goodbye loan modification.
Now, I received this phone call between two events yesterday. The first event occurred when our new cat Horatio elected to race after our Ocicat Tessa and, in the commotion, leapfrogged over the sofa and barreled our Christmas cactus to the floor, shattering the vase and sending dirt flying everywhere. Later, right after this call, while talking to a team member, I heard a loud crash in the sunroom. My hanging planter, which holds 4 elephant foots, had catapulted to the floor, banged into one of the litter boxes and smashed the plastic box into smithereens. I guess Horatio tried to hang from the plant. He can leap, that cat. Geez.
Those were not situations I could have foreseen. Our other 2 cats have never destroyed plants or vases like this. When a person stops making mortgage payments, though, that is the time to talk to the specialists who can explain how foreclosure works and what you can do to prevent a trustee’s sale. Not on the date of the trustee’s sale.
Anybody can file a Notice of Request for Default Notice. Even a tenant. If you’re a tenant renting from a homeowner, it might be a good idea to record a Notice of Request. It’s not difficult to obtain the trust deed information, and you can get it from a County Courthouse. It costs about ten bucks to record.
I had prepared a comparative market analysis for the seller. She had equity and stood to make about $20K from the sale. But it was not meant to be. The auction happened and the trustee refused to postpone it again.
If you’re in trouble on your mortgage and falling behind in your payments, call a Sacramento Realtor for help before it is too late. You may not need to lose all of your equity. You can call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
Put Sacramento Short Sales on the Market Prior to Default Notice
A Notice of Default filing starts the clock ticking on Sacramento short sales. © big stock photo
Unlike the hey days of pre-2012 in Sacramento, we are not seeing a lot of short sales in the area anymore. About 4% of all the listings in Sacramento County at the moment are active short sales, as compared to about 75% a while back. Having a small percentage of homes for sale that are underwater is good news for just about everybody, though, except that short sale seller who needs to sell her home.
In case you’re wondering, and I suspect you probably are, my own caseload of short sales has dramatically decreased, but I still manage to sell and negotiate a large number of Sacramento short sales. I thought the number was much smaller than it is, but so far this year almost 1 out of every 4 sales I’ve closed has been a short sale. It means I am still pulling in a huge chunk of the short sale business and most likely continue to rank as the best Sacramento short sale agent in town.
Even though this month my closed sales for the month of July should top $6 million, only two of those homes were short sales, and they were small price tags. It is possible that July could be my biggest month this year. One of those two sales, though, was a real struggle in West Sacramento. The main problem was the dog urine smell in the back bedroom, compounded by additional problems: a rotting pergola that needed to be removed, additional pest work that was required and a broken HVAC. Not exactly every home buyer’s dream home.
On top of this, as expected, Bank of America had threatened to release the servicing, and the investor Fannie Mae demanded a higher sales price, which I challenged because it was incredibly out-of-line. It would not appraise for the buyer’s lender. Fannie Mae agreed to reduce the sales price but it was still higher than the buyer wanted to pay, but not so high another buyer wouldn’t pay it. That’s often the secret to these negotiations.
However, the sad news is other short sales are lingering, even priced way below the comparable sales, they sit. Buyers are passing by those listings in favor of fast closings and sellers who will make repairs. Some short sales take 3 months to sell today. That’s not good news if a seller has a Notice of Default filed already.
A Sacramento Short Sale Lifespan
For the first time in my life, which is almost since the dawn of humankind, MLS has not immediately loaded on my computer when accessed. I have an internet connection. MetroList is just not responding. It won’t open in Safari nor Firefox. It partially loaded in Firefox and then quit. There is no joy in Mudville; it’s trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for poop, and the Grinch has stolen Christmas.
We count on things in our life to always be there for us and never change. To work when we expect them to work. But that’s not how life works. Stuff goes wrong. People let us down; they die.
But Sacramento short sales can go on practically forever. I have a few I’ve been working on now for more than a year. A short sale doesn’t die. It doesn’t blow up. It doesn’t just go away and, in some cases, the short sale bank won’t even file a foreclosure notice. It’s not having the Notice of Default filed that can keep a short sale alive and pumping out blood long after the arteries have been sliced.
This is the little known secret that agents don’t realize. Once a bank says NO to an agent, many will give up. Not this Sacramento real estate agent. I keep on pushing until either the seller collapses from exhaustion or the bank says: All right, you got it. Here is your short sale approval. Few sellers are outright rejected in this day and age. This is not 2005, Dorothy.
If you want to work with a Sacramento short sale agent who has closed hundreds of short sales, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916 233 6759. I really doubt you will find an agent in the Sacramento Valley who knows more about short sales.
What’s Wrong With the California Homeowner Bill of Rights
How will the California Homeowner Bill of Rights affect short sale sellers in Sacramento? Despite all of the hoopla over it, not much. Probably the most important aspect of the Bill of Rights as it relates to short sales is the stopping of dual tracking — but that only goes into place after short sale approval, not prior to short sale approval, which is when a homeowner needs it.
Dual tracking happens when a foreclosure has been initiated. This means a Notice of Default has been filed in the public records despite a homeowner’s good faith effort to find a solution. Here’s the way it works before and after the California Homeowner Bill of Rights:
- Homeowner falls behind and stops making mortgage payments.
- Homeowner pursues a short sale.
- Lender files for foreclosure.
- Trustee’s Auction date is set.
- Despite a pending offer for a short sale, home can go to foreclosure.
I can only begin to imagine the trepidation felt by homeowners facing an impending trustee’s auction. The problem is most banks will refuse to review a request to postpone a trustee’s auction until the auction date is 3 to 7 days away. It’s not as simple as asking the bank to permanently stop foreclosure action. Certainly not a month or more in advance. Nope, the banks make homeowners chew on their fingernails wondering if the homeowners will be tossed into the street almost all the way to the 11th hour. It’s as though they get some kind of perverse pleasure out of this type of torture. Why can’t a bank postpone a trustee’s auction when it’s 30 or 60 days away? Why make homeowners wait?
One of the services I provide as a Sacramento short sale agent is requesting the postponement of a trustee’s auction. This service, far as I am concerned, falls outside of the scope of selling real estate and dangles dangerously into the realm of practicing law. Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, worrying if a sale will get postponed. A bank is not required to postpone an auction. In fact, if the investor for that loan is Fannie Mae, you can bet your bottom dollar the auction won’t get postponed. That’s why some short sale agents refuse to work on Fannie Mae short sales.
If the California legislature really wanted to pass a Homeowner Bill of Rights, they’d stop dual tracking after a short sale is initiated and verified. Not after short sale approval. Because after the short sale is approved, there is little reason for the bank to initiate a Notice of Default.
