My short sale real estate business is growing by leaps and bounds and to be transparent, it had been difficult stay up on all of my new files. My prior system was a simple spiral bound notebook that I would keep notes in for each homeowner. That way, I would easily reference my notes during each call. While that has been effective, I now have in excess of 25 active and pending short sale files and the old notebook just wasn't cutting it.
After a search online, I discovered an online software called Short Sale Commander that seemed to do everything I was needing and more. Granted, I've had the software for less than a week but so far, I am pretty impressed. Here's my review so far.
This online software allows you to create and store your entire short sale file online. It stores all of the contact information for the seller, lender, and attorney. Also stored is all of the information for every lien on the property (1st mortgage, 2nd mortgage, etc) which the system stores separately for easy retrieval with your next file. If you like a particular negotiator, you can store their contact info which will appear the next time you have a file with that lender. Very cool.
It offers agents the ability to keep track of tasks and stores notes on every task. So now when I'm calling the bank, I simply type my notes into that property file and it saves for future reference. It can store documents and even build a short sale package for you which you can print, save, or efax from their system. Ok, so their system doesn't technically efax but if you had an efax system like RingCentral where you can fax from any email prompt, you could efax from this system. It knows to add account numbers and street addresses in the header and footer of every page...a real time saver. Prior to this, I was building my short sale files with Cute PDF Professional and imposing a header on each page.
By far though, my favorite feature is that Short Sale Commander will allow you to give access (limited guest access) to the buyer agents on your short sale listings. I field a lot of calls from agents wanting to get an update on their short sale contract. Often, the same agent will call 2 or 3 times in a row, desiring not to leave a message. With Short Sale Commander, I can post an update which the buyer agent can see. Plus, the buyer agent can post notes too...similar to how it's done in the Equator system.
Guest Access from Short Sale Commander on Vimeo.
Now, there's little need to field calls when that agent can gain access to the system using a secure username and password and see any notes I choose to make available to them. It's not just limited to agents. Sellers are also able to get access to their own file so that they feel more in control with their file.
Here in North Carolina, an attorney is required to handle much of the negotiations of a traditional short sale. Now, my attorney can have full access to the file, including the documents associated with the file, and we can stay in compliance with any regulating organization.
There are two or three letdowns with the product so far. First, the HUD-1 generator doesn't pro-rate property taxes and it a little limted. Seems like an oversight that should be corrected in a future release. The contact manager does not have a space for company of the lender...again a slight oversight. Finally, and maybe it's there and I havent' found it, it doesn't have the ability to build a default set of tasks that kick-in every time I launch a new file. Still, this isn't a deal killer for me.
What would make this product great is if you could give sellers the ability to upload their own documents....just saying.
Is it worth the $50 a month for the basic subscription? So far: Absolutely! This beats the multiple folders and notebooks any day of the week. Plus, the ability to keep every one on the same page without fielding dozens of calls a day is incredible.
If you plan on handling short sales at a high volume, I recommend trying out Short Sale Commander.
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