Just want to share a short sale nightmare story.
Last year, I had a short sale. Typical waiting period, then my buyer received the approval from the lender on the short sale.
The escrow rolled through quickly, all inspections and appraisals went smoothly.
We scheduled the final walk through for a few days before closing. The listing agent never attended the inspection, nor the final walk through.
Escrow notified us that they will be closing a day or two early about 3 days before closing, so immeditately the next day we did the final walk through.
My buyer and I were astonished when we did the walk through - NOT A STICH OF PERSONAL ITEMS HAD BEEN PACKED. Everything was as it was from when we first saw the house 3 months ago!
When we reminded the owner that we are closing TOMORROW, he played it off like he "forgot".
I immediately got on the phone and contacted the listing agent and got voicemail.
Well, we closed the next day with the previous owner still in the house. He had no intention of leaving.
My client had to look into eviction proceedings, there were many details in the following weeks including confrontations between buyer and seller. And of course the listing agent the whole time was just lurking in the shadows knowing this was a major screw up on his part. To this day I do not know if he knew about this ahead of time.
Well, in the end, I put my thinking cap on and did my best acting job to pretend to be friendly to the "squatting" seller and I ended up assisting him in finding a home to lease.
LESSON LEARNED - ALWAYS MAKE IT A CONDITION THAT THE LOAN WILL NOT FUND UNTIL IT IS VERIFIED THAT THE HOUSE IS VACANT ON AN OWNER-OCCUPIED SHORT SALE!!!!!
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