Wow-two ratified contracts last week! Six of my nine listings are in escrow in one form or another and I am expecting more offers on 2-3 of these plus on another active listing.

Who said that the market is slow????

Granted these are short sales and take more time but I would rather be busy doing lots of little transactions than be bored waiting for the one big one.

I am aware that many of us do not like short sales. Most agents I know don't like them; many prospective purchasers do not like having to wait for 2-3-4 months (sometimes longer) for lender approval.

I am in one short sale-with B of A and Chase-going on 7 months now. If I didn't care about my clients, I would have thrown in the towel a long time ago. Another lender (Wells Fargo Home Mortgage) deleted our package because they claimed that they didn't have something that had been faxed to them three times. I got a timely offer, over asking, and a back-up and their 3-4 weeks to respond has turned into 2 ½ months and we still hear 30 more days every time we speak to them.

I am soooooooooooooo annoyed with these lenders. Why can't they approve these transactions in a timely manner? Van anything be done to compel them to respond? To communicate? I am very frustrated with every lender but one with whom I have dealt-and that was a year ago. If the lenders are so overwhelmed, why don't they use those billions of dollars of bail-out money to hire more staff in their loss mitigation departments????????

In one of three I am now doing with Countrywide, I faxed the package in March 5, again the 13th and yet again March 23. Finally when we followed up on the third submission, a very nice woman gave us her email and Voila! we were in the system the next day.

When we asked her why no one had done this before, she said that we should have asked for an email and to speak with a supervisor. My client and I told her that we had repeatedly asked for an email as the faxes were lost in space and had asked the last guy with whom we spoke for a supervisor and he refused!

Now I have got to go through this two more times with Countrywide.

And what really angers me is that after all of this hard work, they have the gall to not only reduce my commission from 6% to 5%--which I can live with-but then they want me to cut it even more (my deal from H*** with Chase as the second).

There are times I wonder why I bother with all of this aggravation and then I realize it is for two or three reasons. Most importantly, I do care about the people who have lost their wealth in their homes. Concurrent with that is their gratitude provides me with more referrals and future business. Lastly, the reality is that short sales are here and will be here for a while. (If I can figure out how to attach or copy an excel spread sheet, I will provide the San Francisco short sale stats in another post.)

~Rebecca White