How do I write an escalation email to a short sale lender?
One of the biggest problems with short sales is getting stonewalled by bank employees who don’t seem to care and who don’t reply promptly or accurately to your requests.
After you have gone to great lengths to secure an offer/buyer, gather and present all of the necessary short sale documentation (twice or thrice!) the spiteful negotiator at the bank comes back with a flat denial, or worse, ignores you for a month.
Finally you get a hold of the bank and they have closed your file for some irrational reason.
We all intuitively know we need to get a superior involved. But the questions agents often have are, “what do I say? How do I say it? Will they even care?”
So, to your question, "How do I write an escalation email to a short sale lender?"
By rough calculations I have escalated or helped another agent escalate over 3,000 times since 2007. (That’s 1 time for each of my files and an average of 1 every workday in the same period.) I share that to offer perspective, I’ve done this a lot and helped others as well. The result is fairly predictable if you keep to just 3 simple rules when emailing upper management at the bank.
#1) Brevity. (That’s it- just keep it brief. Brief as in, less than 2 paragraphs. The person you are emailing is busy and if their staff filters their email you want for your message to be clean and direct.)
#2) Courtesy. (You are emailing an educated, well compensated and normally very capable person. They don’t need you to whine and rant about how evil their bank is in order to get their attention. I’ve found that the ‘superiors’ at the VP and Exec level are astonishingly helpful and respond to intelligent, brief emails.
#3) Focus on the MONEY. (Talk about the one thing that motivates banks all the time: Money. Share the difference between the short sale they are reviewing and the foreclosure that’s imminent. Take the net payoff from the HUD and then calculate the foreclosure net. Share both numbers as a statement of fact and don’t try to convince them of anything. They will know if you are telling the truth or not. This is also an appropriate time to mention the alternative collection options should the lender decline the short sale. Often short sale banks forget or overlook state statutes that protect the borrower from collections after foreclosure. You can include a brief statement with a link or reference to the specific state statute. THIS IS EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE.)
By using this one strategy properly we have saved nearly every short sale we’ve done. By presenting accurate, intelligent emails to bank management we have saved hundreds of homeowners from foreclosure. Banks have also reduced their losses as a result and would have LOST even more had we not sent these pesky ‘escalation emails’ to clearly show them how good the short sale is.
I don’t mean for this to sound boastful;) but I sincerely think this could help some of my fellow agents out there.
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