What is YOUR Experience With Short Sales?

Did the cat eat your homework or was it the bank losing your paperwork again?  If there was such a thing as a short sale school for banks, these banks would definitely be suspended or in detention on a regular basis.

The California Association of Realtors wants to put pressure on the banks to run a more streamlined process with these short sales.  The Association is asking  for help in order to hear various stories to present and to best understand what is happening.

And so much is happening…

many homeowners feel mistreated by their banks.  Spending hours on hold, never speaking to the same person twice, packs and packs of paperwork being lost, and worst of all rejections for reasons that are incomprehensible.

An example of bank situations gone wild was in the San Francisco Chronicle: “They owed $400,000 on a home worth $700,00.  They applied for a refinance of their adjustable mortgage to their lender, Countrywide.  The application moved slowly, and then countrywide was sold to BofA.  BofA evidently turned their refi application into a loan modification request.  Not even sure what a loan mod was, they hired an attorney.

Bank representatives told the couple and their attorney that the bank would not accept payments because they were in loan mod status, although a loan mod agreement never happened.  Since they weren’t making payments, they were sent notices that they were delinquent and facing foreclosure.”

Home auctioned!

Yes, that is right, this couple who had $300,000 in their home and could have sold for a profit had their home auctioned in a foreclosure sale.

The husband worked full time on getting the house back, spending hours a day on the phone, countless faxes of financial paperwork, saving all fax receipts.  He contacted 18 elected officials, local and national.  He ate, drank, slept, and lived fighting the bank.

It took from August to January for them to get their home back.

Craziness, right?

So, agents, buyers, sellers alike, help out and send an email with your stories about what is going on so that the California Association of Realtors is aware of the difficulties that you deal with on a regular basis. 

There is an email box dedicated solely to information about short sale experiences at [email protected]

If you have any questions email us at [email protected]