Recently we have encountered a new layer on the road to the settlement table. The eagerly awaited Clear to Close came in the morning. The new layer came in the afternoon. QC (Quality Control) has been invented by the lenders to, one more time, look over the file to check for anything missing or out of date that the other layers may have missed. That might seem insignificant except that they just added six days to the road to the settlement table. We have told our buyers, sellers, and the settlement agents that we have the Clear to Close, scheduled a date and a time and now have to go back to all and say, BUT, we don't really have the final Clear to Close. During this six days, the documents have the possibility of falling out of date. Now we have to go back to the buyer for new bank statements and pay stubs and pull the credit again.
I know that the news media wants us to believe that the banks are trying to make things easier in the mortgage industry, but, when will that happen? With the new appraisal system stalling processing because the clearing house is not motivated to get appraisals done in a timely manner by regionally qualified appraisers who won't take the reduced payments for the increased requirements on the appraisal and the continuous addition of approval layers, do we really have a Clear to Close or just another opportunity for things to go wrong?
Hopefully, with the aid of the NAR and our state Associations and our personal involvement, we can get Congress to get the banks back on track and stop adding stumbling blocks to what used to be a fairly consistent process on the way to Settlement. Who is really looking at what the banks are doing? The Realtors are caught in the middle and the stalled real estate industry is keepong ths country in a recession track.
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