EDITORS NOTE: Wow, these people really need to start using the Short Sale Engine. 99% of their problems and complaints are because they don’t have the right tools to run a Short Sale transaction efficiently.
SOURCE: The Ledger
“Short sales are not fun,” said Pete Howlett, a Four Corners Realtor. “It’s a frustrating process.”
Short sales have become very popular with buyers, since the asking prices of sometimes brand new homes in desirable locations are set ell below the amount charged during the height of the real estate boom. But they’ve also become a major headache for buyers and real estate agents alike, since banks are notoriously slow to make a decision on a short sale offer. Even when they do, the buyer is often contractually obligated to let the bank hold out for a higher bid to come in.
“Not everybody is motivated to stay around for seven months to get an answer,” said Four Corners Realtor An Flamand.
Howlett and Flamand are members of the Four Corners Business Council, a group of small business owners in Four Corners who work in fields related to real estate, and who meet once a month at Flamand’s office in Polo Park to network and share ideas on how to survive in a tough economy.
The council members are showing an increasing level of frustration with short sales transactions, in part because they’re such a huge part of the market right now and simply can’t be ignored.
“They’re 60 percent of the sales right now,” Howlett said. “The short sales, I’ll do them because that is 60 percent of the market, so you have to. But it’s a pain in the tail dealing with these banks.”
Howlett said he had reason for optimism earlier this year when Bank of America announced what sounded like an innovative new approach: allowing Realtors to file a bid electronically, with the promise of a quick response. But Howlett this system turned out to be an even bigger disaster than a regular short sales transaction.
“I thought it was going to be the Holy Grail,” he said. “But it’s not any better. It took me two weeks to get logged into their system. They kept jerking me around with my password.”
Finally he was able to submit a big on a home.
“I had a full price offer, and I got back a response saying – ‘insufficient offer,’ “ he said.
Howlett called a customer service representative, who had no answers for him, so he kept asking to speak to the next person – and then the next person – higher up on the food chain.
“It took me six hours in one day, on one deal, and I got nowhere,” he said. “I said, ‘What will you accept,’ and he said ‘I can’t tell you that, it’s not how we operate.’ So I said, ‘Let me talk to your boss.’ He said, ‘My boss doesn’t take phone calls.’ “
Howlett said the entire short sales process has tumbled into confusion and stupidity.
“It’s an exercise in patience,” Howlett said.
“It should never have become that complicated,” Flamand said. “Why are we even wasting our time? It shouldn’t be like that.”
Sean DePasquale, a senior loan officer with Florida Mortgage Partners Inc., said Realtors and homebuyers should brace themselves, because a second wave of major foreclosures could easily be on the way. That means a lot more short sales in the future.
“In Florida, there are more people three months behind on their mortgages than anywhere else in the country,” DePasquale said. “That means in about three months, all of those will be short sales.”
DePasquale said he knows a lot of people who work in the banking industry, and he noted that if Realtors hate this system, the morale among those in financing is even lower.
“For those people who deal with short sales at the banks, the turnover is unbelievable,” he said.
Not everyone is negatively impacted by the state’s foreclosure problems. L. Scott Brown, who runs Orlando Title Services, a mortgage firm, noted, “Foreclosures drive our business. We probably represent 20 per month. We are doing an immense amount of business in foreclosures.”
Howlett said a lot of the problems with short sales would get better if banks started asking for, and sticking with, a certain price.
“If they could just set a price that they would accept, that would make a difference,” he said. “They won’t determine a price because they’re always willing to wait for that better price to come in. But if they did that, we could flush a lot of this inventory out of the system.”
