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When a Short Sale in Elk Grove Takes a Year to Close
Happy couple after closing a short sale in Elk Grove © Big Stock Photo
People love to hear my tales about true stories that happen in Sacramento real estate, especially when it comes to long-suffering short sales in Elk Grove. Why Elk Grove? Because so many of the neighborhoods in Elk Grove were built during 2004 to 2008 or refinanced during the boom, which means Elk Grove has had its fair share of short sales. Also, many of the loan modifications promised to homeowners turned out to be jokes.
Lots of short sales close within 3 months, but every so often I get that oddball short sale that turns out to be a huge challenge.
Many oddball short sales are problematic due to condition because buyers just don’t want to do any work. They want a turnkey home in a nice neighborhood, and they don’t care if they buy the home for a little bit less if it needs work. They prefer to buy a home that requires zero work even if it means paying a little more.
I have sold this pool home in Elk Grove 5 different times. I listed this in October of last year. I was beginning to wonder if this was maybe a flashback to the early short sales of 2006. It was a boomerang, every time we’d go into escrow, BAM, it would fall back out again. It didn’t help that there were 3 loans, all with HUD. Yup, it was an FHA short sale through Bank of America, one of the worst types of short sales among the hundreds I’ve closed. We worked our way through it and got the Approval to Participate and received an approved price of $350,000.
Things were looking up, and we were very close to receiving the short sale approval letter when all of a sudden, BAM, Bank of America dumped the servicing and the loans for this Elk Grove short sale were sold by HUD to an institutional lender, BSI, which seems to specialize in buying underwater mortgages held by FHA and others.
The negotiator at BSI told us they were sending out an agent to do a BPO and obtain an estimate for the repairs. Instead, they sent a representative of an investment group that planned to buy the property from the bank after foreclosure. How do we know this? The guy told the seller who he was. Grinned and carried on about how they buy foreclosures directly from the bank, bypassing the trustee sale. The seller should have kicked him out of the house, but he didn’t.
We were a week or so away from foreclosure. The bank suddenly decided it wanted an additional $40,000. This was about the time somebody in the neighborhood stole my sign post and dragged the panel to the high school. Then some agent in Elk Grove — probably a doofus with too much time on his hands and not enough business — reported my listing to MetroList and accused me of relisting the home without written permission, which of course I had. I don’t understand the problem with some agents.
Now, other listing agents might have given up at this point. Just washed their hands of the whole mess. Not this Elk Grove Realtor. I promised my seller we would close. First, I told the negotiator at the bank that I knew all about the scheme to sell the home privately to an investment group and to intentionally thwart the seller’s chances of a short sale. There are laws against this kind of behavior. And I let him know that I had advised the seller to obtain legal advice.
A lawyer? BAM, the foreclosure sale was postponed. We ultimately found another buyer who was willing to pay the higher price and do the repairs required by the buyer’s lender in advance of closing. Those kinds of buyers, btw, are few and far between these days. By the hair of our collective chinny, chin, chin, we closed escrow today, a day early even.
Losing a Wrapped Radiator Earring in Downtown Sacramento
The thing about actively selling Sacramento real estate all day long and being engaged, on-call, on my toes, alert and ready for any crap that is thrown in my direction is the fact that I don’t have a lot of time to spend on any of my obsessions, like trying to find a replacement for the wrapped-radiator earring I lost downtown. Yesterday was extremely windy. I parked in front of the Memorial Auditorium, hacked that portal in Ingress, captured it, while I fumbled for quarters to feed the meter in the midst of super strong gusts that blew down 15th Street. My hair probably resembled an octopus, curls flying in all directions.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in de Vere’s Pub with my husband for lunch — which has pretty decent grub btw — that I noticed my wrapped-radiator earring was missing from my left ear. You’d think that my Bluetooth device, which I wear on that ear as well, would have hooked the earring or prevented it from flying away, but that’s what I get for not sticking the little plastic doohickeys on the backs of my earlobes for security. 100% my fault.
Wrapped-Radiator Earring by McKenna Hallet
The artist who created those earrings resides in Maui, and she doesn’t sell to the public. I met McKenna Hallett at the Four Seasons last summer when my friend and team member Barbara Dow grabbed a much needed getaway vacation. She makes low-impact jewelry, things made from stuff she finds around the island, and she doesn’t use electricity or precious resources other than a treadle-driven sewing machine or her own muscle power. Her mission statement seems to be: Wearable art made without burning fossil fuels from stuff I find.
As I stuffed quarters into the parking meter, my phone rang, which froze my Ingress screen. The caller was a bank negotiator advising that the bank decided to send a person from the investment team to personally tour one of my listings of homes in Elk Grove and assess the damage. Even though we had delivered photographs and a contractor’s bid. They want to figure out whether they’ll make more money from an REO or from a short sale. I hate to say in this case I’m guessing they’ll choose REO because the occupants make it difficult to show.
There are many portals on 15th Street, and they change from Enlightened to Resistance and from Resistance to Enlightened faster than a Sacramento Realtor can deploy resonators. My cell rang again, and this time it was Roof Doctors to say they cannot provide a roof certification on a pending escrow. I didn’t need to capture the Taco Truck portal anyway. I’ll deal with this disappointing news.
But I sure wish I could have found my missing wrapped radiator earring. Walking back to my car, I realized that it could have flown into the bushes or been stepped on, flung into the street and, even if I spotted it, I probably would not recognize it, since I had a good 5-block area where it could have vanished. The best thing to do is just replace it. Short of flying back to Maui, I tracked down the artist and she gave me an outlet that sells McKenna Hallet’s stuff. Of course, I have to call them, and all of my other business gets in the way of that because I only work on personal matters after my real estate activities finds a break. Some days, that’s never. C’est la vie.
