Montgomery County Short Sale-What to Do After the Offer?
So, your Short Sale in Montgomery County PA in under contract pending third party approval. 
The buyer has decided to make an offer and turned in all his/her supporting documents. The seller and their agent have put together all the required seller documents for the short sale in Montgomery county PA package. 
A properly trained short sale Realtor, like one with an SFR designation and a list of successful short sales in Montgomery county PA documented, will now make sure that every document required is correctly filled out and contains the loan number on every document at the top of the page.
The short sale Realtor will contact the third party lender and get the instructions to get the package to them, usually more often than not, the lenders want the package faxed to them. If they want you to express mail the package make sure you have a duplicate package prepared to keep for yourself, just in case. Recently, one of our short sales; we expressed mailed the package and it was signed and accepted but somehow it ended up in unaccounted for. Next, they lost our two faxes of a package that contained over 100 pages and they even said they never received our email when we emailed the package. So make sure you have a back up plan and a back up copy of the entire set of short sale documents.
Time Saving Tip #1: A fellow short sale Realtor recommended to me that I buy one of those stamp kits that you can change the numbers and letters, so you can create a custom stamp and place the loan number on the stamp and use that to stamp all the pages of the short sale package instead of hand writing the loan number on 80 to 100 pages of documents. Doing this will save you some time. Once the Short Sale package is delivered to the "third party" or lender for approval, we will call the lender to make sure that they have received the package. This one action requires the patience of Job, believe me, it is a skill that I had to develop. Some lenders are easy to get through and some lenders are a nightmare, these days mostly the latter. Sometimes my assistant has been on hold for over an hour just to reach the right person to simply find out if the package is there.
Here's a suggestion: This is one of those disclaimers that you find on reality TV's shows like JackAss: Please do not attempt a short sale in Montgomery county PA if you are impatient or expect everyone to jump when you say jump, you will surely get nowhere fast while on the phone with most lenders. They really don't care about your busy day, remember that one loan is just a number to them, once their desk is cleared of your file another replaces it and so on...and so on.....
Time Saving Tip #2: Call the lender early in the morning, get on that phone before all the other callers start calling and the processor goes from a good mood to a sour one. The early bird gets the worm!
Once we get someone on the phone, ie the person who will be handling the short sale application, I confirm that they have received the package and that they have received our authorization letter from the seller so we can speak to the lender. The first thing I do is to confirm that this lender actually holds the note for this property. I have had a recent short sale where the lender was sending the loan payments to another lender and that lender in turn sold the processing of the loan to someone else without ever telling the seller. Since the first day of giving this lender notice that we were doing a short sale that note ended up being sold twice in a period of just a couple of weeks. The lenders were playing hot potato with this loan!
Realtor Tip: Make sure that you call ahead before you even get an offer to the lender to confirm that they are still in fact the lender. Notes are being sold every day so you need to stay on top of this. There are note holders that service loans that they do not own. In these situations the servicing takes care of all the short sale paperwork and acts in behalf of the note holder. For instance, we have an active file now where the servicing is Chase Home Mortgage and the note holder is HSBC. Chase is like the negotiator for HSBC.
There are also companies that just do Short Sale processing and negotiations that lenders will contract out their short sales to. We have had the best results from these types of companies, since they are more streamlined as a business model to handle the mountain of specific paperwork associated with short sales in Montgomery county PA. Obviously this company is also getting paid upon the completion of each short sale so they are quick to respond to us. I usually can get right through directly to the negotiator on the file.
Then there are the lenders who are trying to do it all themselves. These lenders own the note, service the note and handle all aspects of the Short Sale. These tend to be the hardest nut to crack, so to speak. To get through, as they are totally swamped with files and they do not have experience in doing Short Sales, can be an ordeal. A salaried employee who knows little to nothing about the real estate business is what you end up with. Most of the time, by the time these lenders do something with your short sale package the buyer who has lost patience is long gone!
Whether buyer, seller or Realtor Remember what I said about the patience of Job!
Final Note: If you lose a buyer, don't get down and don't sweat it. Once the counteroffer is made from the lender you will know exactly what they will accept for the property. This is cut and dry, with little to no room for negotiation . This is a business decision for them and there is a VERY CLEARnumber that they will not go below, based on several factors that are out of your control. The next buyer that comes along will be able to close quickly, and you will know what the bank is willing to accept. The next post will specifically address the banks position on short sales and what factors determine what they will accept in an offer to purchase a short sale in Montgomery county PA.
Contact James Harner CRS, Certified Short Sale Realtor of the James Harner Group, Inc. Licensed Realtor® in PA at Richard A. Zuber Realty at 610-310-7646.
To list your property for sale or to purchase a property in Boyertown, Collegeville, Eagleville, Limerick, King of Prussia, Phoenixville, Pottstown, Red Hill, Royersford, and the rest of Montgomery County PA Homes and Chester County PA Homes. We are accepting qualified referrals.
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