photo courtesy of bgilliard
I hate this sort of phone call.
I'm picking up the phone in just a moment. It's the sort of phone call I hate to have to place. I have to let a client know some news that changes everything for them today. As of this morning, they were happy people. This afternoon, they won't be. We've been looking for a property for them for two weeks now. We're looking at foreclosures mostly and we finally found one that was going to serve their needs. We wrote a very strong offer after I did my research on the property. Full price because we didn't want to lose out and we knew the seller's situation thanks to their listing agent. We wanted to go in strong to secure the home for us. We sent the offer in and received a counter.
Yes, a counter offer. On someone who was heading down the path to foreclosure. Seems the agent miscalculated the payoff amount. This seller is desperate to sell to get through this with barely a scratch and we were willing to help them (and get the house my clients wanted). The note came last night and I spoke to my clients. They weren't pleased, but they agreed to work it out. We made a verbal counter offer and I received email notification early this morning that we were good to go and I could get counter-signatures.
Then the emails came.
The first one asked me if we could make the option fee as a money order because the listing agent's client didn't have a bank account set up yet in their new hometown. Ok, fair enough. I arranged it. Signatures and money order will be in place today at 2:30. Sweet. *Beep beep* My email again, better check it. Ugh. Seems the agent not only miscalculated the pay-off value, but also didn't find out that the bank have moved to foreclosure status and assigned a lawyer to the case. Suddenly, we're now looking at a short sale. My clients aren't interested in the short sale wait. I guess we'll find out what my client's think when I pick up the phone.
Agents - stay on top of the foreclosure process.
If you're going to list and work with foreclosures, short sales, and cases where it's getting close; please keep up on the property. I know we're dealing with sometimes irrational and logic-defying banks, but this has wasted my time, the client's time, and probably frazzled them one last time. My clients did all they could to help your client. My clients were willing to go above and beyond what they wanted to initially do. They actually were trying to get a new house and to help your client (yes, they really cared). All of it? For nothing. Now we're faced with the truly irrational and logic-defying status of a short sale. We're going to see if we can push it through anyway, but had the listing agent just stayed a little more on top of the case, I might not be making this dreaded phone call.
In a city like San Antonio, we have far less foreclosure (or near) inventory than many cities. If we work hard, we can clean this inventory up. But only if we work hard, smart, and efficiently and stay on the ball with the status of our listings. So please, I beg you, check where your listings stand right now - and update, correct, or change if necessary.
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