Well, I wrote about the coming change to Bank of America's short sale processing a few months ago and now it is upon us in full force. The LAMB Group specializes in Short Sales in Charlotte and as a result, I've had the opportunity to work with the new "Equator" system on about 18 of our listings in 2010. For those of you who haven't heard yet, the new website called Equator has certainly changed the way that Bank of America and now GMAC short sales are being handled. Short Sale specialists in Charlotte NC and around the country can agree, this system is better than it used to be but to what extent is yet to be proven.
It seems to me that the first phases of valuation and paperwork submission are much better. You can begin a short sale online and upload all of the paperwork with a certainty that they will get it. No more lost faxes! They get the BPO done almost immediately, last week one was completed even before we had access to the home. The BPO agent was actually the very first person to see just how distressed this property was. There is more data entry now, but I don't mind it so much. I think that it puts more of the control over accuracy on my staff and its really better that way. We're the ones who have to deal with mistakes so at least now if a mistake is made, its ours and we can devise a plan to correct it in the future (rather than just dealing with it like before). Once all of the initial setup is complete, they wait for the offer from the listing agent.
Many of our short sale listings in Charlotte get offers immediately. Hell, there's this one guy who has some spam offer making software that submits a "robo-offer" on every single short sale home we list. If you have short sale listing or foreclosures in Charlotte then you've probably received one too. Well, one of the things I like most about Equator is the fact that you can get immediate declinations. So, if the offer is crap, then they spit it back out in just a couple of days.
Now here's the part that keeps me questioning this new system. Once the valuation and paperwork is done, once the offer has been submitted and reviewed, they give preliminary acceptance on it and you think, "Wow, that was fast!" No, it wasn't. Now, we wait, just like always. They claim that the wait is not supposed to be longer than 21 days from that point but it's always longer. At least now, they seem to care about us having to wait and give options for escalation that can be effective. I have seen the average time from one of our BofA short sale go from 5 or 6 weeks in December to maybe 4 or 5 weeks now so there is some slight improvement. Only time will tell if they begin to fully utilize the software but in the end, it's the number of humans making decisions on the back end which need to increase. Once we have more negotiators and more managers at all levels of the process, then we'll have faster decisions. Until then, we'll just continue to wait.
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