Must admit, this was a new one. In the midst of following up on the status of "short sale" I have in progress, I was informed by the bank that they were still waiting for some "internal documentation". Hmmm...I wondered. Didn't they feel they had enough by now? After all, I'd sent them 167 PAGES of all sorts of documentation! Everything from soup to nuts (SPEAKING OF NUTS!!!!!....) At any rate,I kept my cool and politely asked "could you be more specific...I want to be sure I understand where we are in the process". At first my contact said "well it appears we're still waiting for the BPO". I said that sounded very strange since I'd met the agent at the property so she could do her BPO over 3 WEEKS ago. My contact politely apologized and said "yes, I'm sorry, the BPO actually IS in the system. What we're waiting on now is RMV". HUH???? "What on earth is that?" I asked (I should have known better!) She tells me "why that's our recompiled market value".
Recompiled? Did they not like the way it was compiled in the first place? Was the appraisal not sufficient? Or the exhaustive CMA...all 31 pages of it? I suppose I should be greatful they don't rely on the tax assessors "value"....out Short Sale contract would NEVER get approved. Oh, if ONLY....could we maybe get that tax assessor to buy the house??? If they did, we wouldn't NEED to do a short sale!
Now, I'm not a stranger to this idea of conflicting versions of "value". I wrote about it at some length some months ago in In the Eye of the Beholder. What a buyer thinks, what an appraiser thinks, what a lender thinks, etc., are all rather subjective, shaded by each party's particular needs and motivation. What has me dumfounded, though, is how adding yet another layer of opinion is likely to solve anything at all? Who has the "right" answer anyway?
Maybe this is why these Short Sales are taking so long to get processed ... apparently the banks don't believe their appraisers, or their BPO agents, and they most certainly don't believed the detailed CMA from a listing agent! So, in their infinite wisdom they've decided to have SOMEONE ELSE (or is it SOMETHING else ... perhaps a series of algorhythms applied to the already massive amount of accumulated data) make that determination so they can "decide" whether to run with the contract on the table. It's not enough that the home was on the market for 18 months. It's not enough that there were 6 offers on the table. It's not enough that each of those buyers was bidding against other offers and was told to bring "highest and best". Wouldn't you THINK there was a message in there somewhere???
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