Banks Do Not Care About Your Short Sale

Banks do not care about your short sale is the first truth for a Sacramento agent.

Even through our fast and furious Sacramento short sales over the past 10 years, banks still do not care about your short sale, and it amazes me that people expect a bank to care about individuals. It’s not just the buyers and sellers who want the banks to care about them, it’s their real estate agents, too. They search frantically for answers, for logic based on their limited experience, and they just want somebody to explain common sense to the bank. If only the bank knew . . . they cry.

It’s difficult, I know, to handle the bad news, but the first thing to realize is the bank doesn’t give a crap about you. Just get over that expectation. Banks do not care about our short sale sellers (their borrowers), the seller’s hardship or situation, and it doesn’t care how long the poor buyer has suffered during the process of the short sale. Banks do not care about your short sale. Hoping to make a bank care is like hoping Trump won’t win the Republican nomination.

You can read a pile of misinformation online about how banks spend more money to foreclose than to do a short sale, and much of that is garbage. Unless the writer handles the bank’s finances, the reader can’t know which is more profitable for the bank. Sometimes banks get paid more to do a foreclosure: from the government, from PSAs and from its own structured system. Hoping to explain to the Harvard- and Yale-educated asset managers why a short sale is more profitable than a foreclosure is pitiful, like supporting Ted Cruz.

Ditto with BPOs. The amount of money a bank asks for often has little bearing on market value, and yet agents often want to argue about the sales price of a short sale. Tell the bank how much work the home needs, a buyer’s agent will plead. Oh, please. Show the bank months of lowball offers, photos and estimates and one might make headway. Banks do not care about your short sale and they are not interested in opinions from those engaged.

Once you understand that banks do not care about your short sale, you can begin to move through the process. Just don’t expect to expedite through Equator since many of the major banks have now dropped that platform. I once handled 75 listings at a time but now you can count the short sales I sell today on one hand. Still, the attitude of bankers has not changed one iota over the past 10 years. And the veteran Sacramento short sale agents don’t expect it to.