Don't put up with garbage from banks! They need you more than you need them.

After three months of fighting with a seemingly vacant negotiator, I finally drug my clients across the finish line today.  I had both sides of this deal, so I guess I drug both sets of clients across the finish line.  Ironically, the negotiator who was assigned to this file nearly messed it up at the last minute, but I was one step ahead of her.  That's another story.

If you are new to short sales or REOs, I have some advice for you:

• Don't take any crap off of these folks.  (Is it OK to say that on a blog?).  You are talking to someone in an obscure office somewhere in the country who has a two foot high stack of files sitting her/his desk.  I feel their pain.  But, if they don't like it, they should QUIT!  I didn't hire them, and I didn't ask them to work my file.  So, they need to drop the attitude and do their job.
• Never go to a bank like a poor orphan seeking another bowl of soup.  If you don't take business to them, they don't make money.  It's your presence in the game that causes them to prosper. 
• Don't accept no for an answer.  Keep going up the chain until you reach someone with vision and a brain.  That front line call screen-er, or the first person who seems like he has a clue may not be the authority you need to be talking to, even if he says he is.  I bypassed my negotiator yesterday and went straight to her boss.  We accomplished more in two hours than she and I did in three months.  She called me twice today to make sure things were on target.  We had already closed.  She had a terrible attitude when she called.  It might been because I told her boss that she wasn't an asset in their department.  I encouraged him to get her trained or get her a new role somewhere else in the bank.  She was plugging up the pipeline.
• Get aggressive if you must.  I'm a pretty mild mannered guy, but I don't like incompetence.  If someone is incompetent, I'll try to help them.  If they don't want it, I will run right over them.  More than once, I've gone straight to the CEO or bank president because an employee was incompetent.  I have never failed to get a deal done when I had to do that. 

Some of the failure of the short sale and REO departments of many banks comes down to employees who are not trained well enough to work with complex situations, and in my case, hard charging brokerages.  I have never tried to get an incompetent employee fired, but I have talked to bank leaders about getting them more training. 

I did get one attorney fired at a collection company for mistreating clients verbally.  I actually took that one to Congress.  With his education, I'm sure he was able to get a greeter job at Walmart or something along that line.  In that case, I had zero sympathy. 

The bottom line is, these groups survive in large part because you do your job.  If they are making your job miserable, take it up the ladder.  If you're not satisfied, keep climbing.  Eventually, you'll find that one employee that cares about the clients, his job and his employer.

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Give me a call for all your real estate needs, and let's make something amazing happen. 

Mike Cooper @ Cornerstone Business Group, Inc., 888-722-6029

Real Estate Sales and Property Management

 

(Disclaimer:  All grammatical mistakes, punctuation breakdowns and misspellings are purely for your amusement and entertainment.  Feel free to cackle.)