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School Teachers Can Do a Short Sale
One thing that this Sacramento short sale agent is blessed with is super nice clients. All of my clients are really nice. But some of them are exceptionally nice, over-the-top nice, the kind that if you turned to talk to them while waiting in line at the grocery store you might feel embarrassed because you’d end up hugging a total stranger out of the blue — THAT kind of nice. And I am not a huggy-feely type of person. I am more of a firm handshake type of person.
This particular seller and her husband are high school teachers. They are super sweet, sensitive and caring. They started their life together as a young family in this home in Rancho Cordova. As the years passed, they, like many new families in Sacramento, outgrew the tiny 2-bedroom, 1-bath home.
They bought a larger home in a nearby community and rented out their former residence. Unfortunately, the rent did not cover the mortgage payment and unexpected rental expenses. But they could still get by because they both worked over the summer months at a summer school. When the economy crashed, they lost their summer employment. Expenses mounted. Like so many homeowners in Sacramento, they did not count on the value of the property falling as well. They had hoped if they ran into difficulty that they could sell the home. But selling this home was not an option because they were underwater.
We began this Rancho Cordova short sale in May. The market was very hot in Sacramento in May. Not as sizzling hot as it is now, but it was a strong beginning of our seller’s market. We received a ton of offers and had to sort through them all. One offer stood out from the rest. The offer was from a real estate agent who was trying to buy a home for her son and his fiancé who were beginning their own family. The lender in this situation was Sun Trust (notoriously slow), and there was a second lender that was demanding more than the first loan would allow. The buyer agreed to hang in for the duration and not cancel. Bingo, that’s our buyer.
It took us 7 months to negotiate and close this Rancho Cordova short sale. We were rejected once because the lender could not understand that teachers live on 10 months’ of income in a 12-month calendar year. An important thing I have learned over the years as a Sacramento short sale agent is not to give up. Not to throw in the towel. Especially NOT when sellers are counting on you and the buyers are counting on you. If there is a shred of hope, you find a way to get the message through, and you close.
Bank of America FHA Short Sale Approved
Wow, a Bank of America FHA short sale started in December of last year finally closed escrow in November. It took 11 months to close the sale of this Rancho Cordova home. And this was an escrow in which the seller hired and paid a lawyer to negotiate. They did this before they called me. I was hired solely to sell the short sale, not to negotiate, which is a little odd but OK. I do whatever my clients want.
A representative from the Sacramento law firm called the Bank of America negotiator at one point almost every single day. It’s not just a Sacramento short sale agent who struggles with the B of A FHA Short sale processes. Lawyers can fare even worse.
I’ll tell you who has the hardest job in all of this. It’s the buyer’s agent. It’s that Sacramento buyer’s agent who is saddled with the job of having to call that potential homeowner every week or so to explain what’s going on. These agents have to give plausible reasons for the delay yet continue to build hope in their client’s heart. It’s not an easy job by any stretch. Half the time the buyer’s agents don’t know what’s going on because nobody tells them anything. They are not allowed to talk to the short sale bank.
I understand how difficult that job is, and that’s one of the reasons I post my updates online. Yeah, right on my website, you can read Sacramento short sale updates. Buyer’s agents and their buyers can access daily updates. Each property is identified by the street name without the house number. No personal information of either the seller nor the buyer is divulged. It’s mostly actions committed by and requested by the bank so all parties to the transaction can monitor the movement. My Sacramento short sales do not fall into a black hole. Anybody and their Uncle Joe can see that I am constantly on top of my short sales. I am held accountable for my actions.
Which is more than one can say about Bank of America and its FHA short sales. Unfortunately.
You see, there is nothing that I can really do about a Bank of America FHA short sale. Especially when I am not negotiating it. I am not an agent who farms out her negotiations to another short sale negotiator. I care about my clients too much to do that. (Although, sometimes it is necessary to bring in a lawyer, but that’s rare.) I do my own work. I am hands on. As a result, I have learned that I can lessen the damage, the heartbreak, the disappointments by not putting that short sale on the market until we have the Approval to Participate from FHA. That’s the only way I have found to shorten the 8- to 12-month wait for approval on an FHA short sale at Bank of America. After receiving the Approval to Participate, that wait is only 4 to 6 months, and that’s not half as bad.
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.
