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Handling a Short Sale Counter Offer
When a short sale bank issues a counter offer, it’s not really a counter offer. Except that it is. It’s just not the type of counter offer that most Sacramento real estate agents recognize. Confused? A short sale counter offer arrives in different forms. Sometimes it looks like Buddha, and other times you’d swear it’s sporting a black cloak and wielding a scythe. It can be in writing or it can be verbal. The counter can be negotiable or non negotiable.
An agent in my office called yesterday about a Chase Bank short sale. I realize that my company has managers who answer these sorts of questions, and they do a bang-up job. But agents also get antsy and don’t always want to wait for a response. Imagine that. An impatient real estate agent! So, every so often, the brave ones call me. I don’t mind helping out a fellow Lyon agent now and then as long as they don’t make it a practice, although I wish they would email and not call.
The agent who called, a super sweet guy, was bent on explaining his entire short sale woes. As I’m listening to him, I’m watching phone calls come across my cellphone screen like a CNN scroll. I ponder whether I should send text messages to the unanswered phone calls and, if so, should I choose the response that says I’m at the dentist or is it better to simply say I’m busy, or don’t they already know that since I didn’t pick up my phone? Do I have to tell them I am awake? Is it any of their business what I am doing?
I like the prepared response choice that says I’m at the dentist because it sounds more respectable than to text my real GPS location, which is I’ve got my head stuck in the frozen dessert section at Safeway, fogging up the freezer. Finally, in my distractions and attempt to focus on my fellow agent’s question, I found myself needing to pull him in that direction as well. I cut to the Chase. Ooo, a pun. I interrupted him and said, “Phone messages are piling up while you are telling me your story, exactly what is your question?”
He wanted to know how Chase issues its short sale counter offers. It felt weird to him that the short sale agent would just call and tell him the price had changed and that the buyer had to pay some other miscellaneous fee. Maybe he expected the counter offer would be white-glove delivered on a silver plate with a juicy JPMorgan Chase insignia wax seal on the envelope. Nope, it’s verbal. Chase short sales are still old school. Documents are faxed to a central location and then lost, just like the old days at Bank of America.
Speaking of which, I received a counter from Bank of America yesterday on a Cooperative Short Sale. Most of the time a buyer’s agent never knows that a counter offer has been accepted unless he or she reads my short sale updates on my website. That’s because counters don’t often involve the buyer. The bank is simply approving or rejecting fees the seller must pay from the proceeds of sale to close. The bank authorizes the expenses of sale. The lower the fees, the higher the bank’s net. It is the seller who pays the fees, not the bank.
This was unusual because the accepted sales price exceeded the preapproved listed price of this Cooperative Short Sale. We had received a number of multiple offers on this short sale. We picked the best offer, which is not necessarily the highest offer. I imagined the buyer would be somewhat stunned to receive an addendum increasing the price and paying a few additional fees. But the bottom line is we want to close this short sale. The bank’s investor has guidelines.
Bank of America stresses that in a Cooperative Short Sale, the preapproved short sale price is precisely that: preapproved. It doesn’t say it will accept that list price. The bank’s investor calls the shots. The buyer, naturally, wanted to know if she could negotiate with the bank, and see, this is the thing. Will another buyer pay that price? In a heartbeat. I know this; it’s not speculation. So, the buyer accepted the Bank of America short sale counter, which is a good thing. Smart buyer, smart buyer’s agent. You know what we call a buyer who doesn’t want to accept a bank’s counter offer like this one? Let’s just say the term doesn’t have buyer attached to it.
A Bank of America Short Sale Counter Offer
Before I talk about a Bank of America short sale counter offer, let’s address this Lady Gaga thing. I mention it only because if I received an engraved invitation, I would decline to attend an event to watch Lady Gaga in a bottle strip to her undies and get a tattoo. I would not go even if I was invited through a last-minute text message. Surely, there are better things to do, no? Like, take out the garbage before your house starts to stink or get a pedicure. But this Lady Gaga thing was a huge black-tie event attended by celebrities as a debut perfume launch. It hurts my eyes to even read about it.
But maybe that’s why I am a Sacramento short sale agent and not running around with the likes of Jason Wu, Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. I have many more exciting things to do like talk to third-party vendors at Bank of America about counter offers. What is a Bank of America counter offer? Well, for starters, it is not exactly a counter offer, which confuses a lot of Sacramento sellers. I try not to use jargon when talking with my clients, but sometimes it slips out, and for that I am truly sorry. I am not sorry that I didn’t go to the Lady Gaga event.
A short sale counter offer is issued by Bank of America or a third-party vendor representing Bank of America through Equator. It is a formal response to all of the fees noted on the HUD and submitted to Equator by this Sacramento short sale agent. See, if the bank can reduce some of the fees, that will increase the bottom-line net to the bank. Plus, investor guidelines state acceptable and non-acceptable fees. Some of the fees often contested are miscellaneous title services such as doc prep, courier, notary and some don’t want to authorize payment for recording of the deed. Sometimes they reduce the escrow fee.
In Sacramento, it is customary for the seller to pay the escrow fee. But in other parts of the country and California, the escrow fee is often split 50 / 50 between seller and buyer. It is not unusual for the bank to place a maximum cap on the amount it will authorize. In many instances, that amount is $750.
There are also negotiators at the bank who do not read the net sheets we send them. They instead read the HUD, and the HUD is very confusing to many people. Ever since the RESPA change a few years ago, we’ve been fighting battles with bank negotiators who insist that credits to the buyer are not allowed — when the credits shown on the HUD are not really a credit to the buyer at all. Sound confusing? Imagine how the bank negotiators feel.
Yesterday I spotted a city transfer tax fee of almost $600 that the negotiator had removed from the HUD. When fees are removed, it means the buyer has to pay them. Because of SB 458, the seller cannot pay fees the bank refuses to authorize. So, I questioned the negotiator. I asked her why it was removed because it was a standard and customary fee paid by the seller in Sacramento. This fee is based on .275% of 1% of the sales price. It can amount to a lot of money, in this case: six hundred bucks.
Turns out the negotiator thought it was a buyer credit on the HUD. After I explained that there were no credits at all on the HUD, the negotiator put that number back into the list of authorized fees and approved it. I wonder if she would like a bottle of Lady Gaga’s new perfume?
Photo: used with permission bigstockphoto
